San Francisco Dedicates a Cable Car to Tony Bennett

Cable car No. 53 took a special Valentine’s Day ride up Nob Hill in San Francisco on Wednesday morning, including a stop outside the Fairmont Hotel, where the car was officially dedicated to the singer Tony Bennett, who died in July at age 96.

It was inside that hotel — at the Venetian Room, in 1961 — that Bennett first publicly performed his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” with its lyrics about cable cars climbing halfway to the stars. The tune still stirs pride and nostalgia in many San Franciscans, and the Giants play it after every home victory.

The dedication, attended by Susan Benedetto, Bennett’s widow, added to a recent string of positive news about the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which operates the city’s buses, streetcars and light rail lines.

Not long ago, the agency’s director, Jeffrey Tumlin, was worried that it was barreling toward a “fiscal cliff,” when it would run out of money and have to make big cuts in service.

But like a cable car climbing steep California Street, the agency’s fortunes are slowly rising.

The system now has 71 percent of the ridership it had before the pandemic, Tumlin said, which is fairly high compared with other public transportation agencies in the Bay Area. The figure for weekend ridership is even better, at 86 percent. Some bus lines have more riders than ever before, and Tumlin said the system’s three historic cable car routes, loved by tourists, were once again fairly full.

“The cable cars are thriving,” he said. “Everyone who visits San Francisco is apparently getting on our cable cars.”

Tumlin said the agency worked hard during the pandemic to make the Muni system “fast, frequent, reliable, clean and safe” — and it seems to be paying off.

The biggest key to Muni’s rebound has been adjusting routes to serve a variety of neighborhoods and destinations, rather than relying primarily on serving downtown office workers, many of whom now work from home. Routes that pass by hospitals or the Chase Center, where the Warriors play, are doing well.

The agency has built 25 miles of transit-only lanes to speed up bus service. The line that travels down Van Ness Avenue past City Hall now moves so quickly that people who are buried in their phones often miss their stops and complain that the bus is too fast, Tumlin said.

The agency has abandoned strict time schedules for its buses and has switched to a system called headway management that focuses on the time interval between buses and gives drivers more flexibility to keep from bunching up along the route.

Of course, it’s not all rosy. The subway lines that run on fixed rails to the financial district and the Moscone Center are struggling without office workers and convention-goers to fill them.

The situation for BART, the rail system that connects the city with much of the Bay Area, is far more dire. With downtown still struggling to rebound, BART is, too: It has recovered just 43 percent of its prepandemic ridership.

“Our ridership mirrors office occupancy,” Alicia Trost, a spokeswoman for BART, said. “It’s as simple as that.”

BART still faces a very real fiscal cliff. A windfall of extra state money last year postponed that scary scenario until 2026, but if a ballot measure that is expected to be put before voters that year does not pass, the agency will be in real trouble, Trost said. The agency, with an annual operating budget of about $1 billion, will find itself short by about $300 million in 2026 without an infusion of funds.

Bus agencies around the Bay Area are generally doing fairly well. SamTrans in San Mateo County is back up to 88 percent of its prepandemic ridership. Fixed rail services that serve mainly downtown commuters are not: Caltrain, which runs between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, has recovered just 38 percent of its ridership.

Even so, on Wednesday morning the mood when it came to public transit in the San Francisco area was pure happiness. Mayor London Breed; Larry Baer, the president of the San Francisco Giants; and other notables celebrated Bennett’s life and the newly dedicated cable car. Benedetto said she wished her husband could have seen it.

“He would have been absolutely thrilled,” she said. “He loved the people of San Francisco, and they loved him.”

Heather Knight is the San Francisco bureau chief of The New York Times.

And before you go, some good news

Some of Hollywood’s biggest names gathered at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills on Monday for the annual Oscar nominees’ luncheon. But in a crowd that included Hollywood veterans like Margot Robbie and Martin Scorsese, it was a new star who stole the show: Messi, the black-and-white Border collie from the French drama “Anatomy of a Fall.”

Messi, who plays Snoop, the family dog, in the film, has acquired a fan base on social media — as well as a “Palm Dog” at the Cannes Film Festival — for his impressive performance, which, at one point includes an affecting show of playing (almost) dead.

On Monday, Messi wore a blue bow tie and was accompanied by a date — his owner and trainer, Laura Martin Contini. He beguiled actors, musicians and A-listers throughout the event, including Billie Eilish, who knelt down to pet him.

The Times Culture reporter Kyle Buchanan and two photographers chronicled Messi’s inaugural Oscar campaign on Monday, along with the rest of the eclectic event and its human attendees. Read the full article and see the photos here.