San Francisco Bay Trains and Ferries from a Bygone Era
Not long ago, it was much easier to get around the San Francisco Bay Area without a car, thanks to a vast system of trains, ferries, trains on bridges, and trains on ferries. BART and the “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” phenomenon brought much of this system to an end
Twin Golden Gate Bridges? A Southern Bay Crossing from Hunter’s Point to Alameda? An underground tunnel under Russian Hill that links Highway 80 in San Francisco with Highway 101 in the Marina? Sound crazy? These and others were the projects that almost happened in the Bay Area in the 50s and 60s. A Bay Area with far less cars, far more ferries and street cars? A ferry from downtown Petaluma to the East Bay? Bridges carrying trains on their lower decks? This WAS the Bay Area in the 30s. Read on and learn about this and more of what happened, almost happened, and should have happened during the history of Bay Area transportation.
Interesting that some of the transportation inventions of the early 1800s were quite serviceable and used well into the 20th century, the steam powered train and the steamboat. Trains and ferries can be remarkably efficient modes of transportation, provided riders fill them up. Steam power could be generated from almost any fuel (including coal, oil, wood, and biomass) making them remarkably versatile. Once cheaper steel began to be produced in the late 1800s, cities were off and running with steel cable and longer-spanned steel bridges. Electric trains and cable cars augmented steam engines beginning in the 1870s. The Key System provided service via street car in the East Bay, and fed ferries to San Francisco, until they were replaced by AC Transit buses. There was even Key System train service running on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge until 1958. The Northwestern Pacific Railroad Co. ran electric train service from Sausalito to Fairfax, and Larkspur (then called San Quentin) to San Anselmo, along with a steam train from Mill Valley to Mount Tam and Muir Woods. The Sacramento Northern Railway ran electric trains from San Francisco to Chico before it stopped passenger service in 1941. The Southern Pacific ran steam train service from San Francisco to San Jose.
Per Chris Carlsson’s “Ferries on the Bay”, ferries ran to San Francisco from places they run today (Vallejo, Sausalito, Tiburon, Larkspur, Alameda/Oakland) plus Sacramento, Petaluma, and Point Richmond. There was a railroad spur extending ¾ mile into the bay from Oakland, called the “Oakland Mole” which served as a kind of central station for the meeting of East Bay trains and bay ferries. The Petaluma ferry operated from 1864 to 1935 (by Petaluma and Santa Rosa Railroad), out of the steamer dock at Haystack Landing, and was a stern-wheeled passenger and freight ferry. Several other ferries carried cars and trains, then known as auto and car ferries respectively. A high-speed Petaluma Ferry proposed from the Petaluma Marina to the San Francisco Ferry Building had a $20 million dollar federal grant in 1998, but was nixed for environmental reasons (presumably having to do with the need for frequent dredging and damage to bird habitat).
The early streetcars and ferries were built in part by early Bay Area developers, at a time when horses and carriages were more common than cars. When the Golden Gate and Bay suspension bridges were built in the mid-30s, much of the streetcar and ferry system gave way to cars and buses. This transformation was well-documented in the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, but not all the transformation was bad. Several streetcars in San Francisco still exist, as do many of the ferries, which are now fewer and faster. Cars began to dominate the Bay Area streetscape, creating smog and forcing houses to be bigger, as the two-car garage became the standard. It is not clear if the dominance of cars created all population growth, as the Bay Area was growing rapidly even before the advent of cars and bridges. Best to look at the City of San Francisco (which still has excellent public transit, plus denser housing) as a look back at another era, when cars were secondary. Alternatively, Los Angeles (most of which was built later), with it’s famous freeways and sprawl, is what happens when cars are king.
Interestingly, BART studies in the 60’s intended to have the Golden Gate Bridge carry trains on its lower deck for an intended route to Marin (recall that the Bay Bridge had done this until 1958). There were detractors to this idea (mostly on the grounds of aesthetics, or possibly competition), but it was deemed feasible by engineers at the time. How different the North Bay would have looked with BART or light rail on the Golden Gate Bridge! There was even talk of a twin Golden Gate Bridge adjacent to the iconic suspension bridge in the 1950’s, but this idea was quickly scrapped.
Have you ever seen the 280 “highway to nowhere” as you exit 280 north into the SF city streets south of market? This was intended to be the beginning of the “Southern Crossing”, another bridge across the Bay, extending to Alameda and eventually to the location of Interstate 980 in Oakland. This idea has been around since the 1940s, and was most recently revived by Sen. Diane Feinstein in 2000 and again last year. It had a daunting price tag of close to $10 billion, and a bond measure to pay for the span failed in 1972.
A Highway Tunnel under Russian Hill was proposed by the Division of Highways in the 50s, to take eight lanes of traffic from the Embarcadero to the Golden Gate Bridge. This plan didn’t survive the San Francisco “Freeway Revolt” of 1964 to 1966. Similar “cut and cover” ideas for placing highway traffic under 19th Ave. were also killed, and billions of Federal Highway dollars were diverted from San Francisco Freeways to Mass Transit projects, most notably BART.
Some of these ideas died a merciful death, but others would be intriguing to resurrect…a ferry to Petaluma or SMART train across the Golden Gate Bridge and under 19th Ave. anyone?
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