♪♪ ♪♪ -It's been celebrated in movie classics as one of the greatest thrills of any modern city -- moving through the streets of San Francisco.

-What does it mean -- "exact change"?

[ Ahooga horn honks ] -Always a city of firsts, San Francisco has long been a laboratory for how to move people across a difficult terrain.

Out of the rubble and a riot, San Francisco invented the modern notion of city-owned transit.

It was an early battleground for guaranteeing that all citizens had a right to ride and for saving neighborhoods from the juggernaut of freeways.

But today, the romance and innovation of moving through the Bay Area are overshadowed by seemingly intractable problems -- congested roadways and ever longer commutes.

Already troubled transit systems are now reeling from a pandemic.

Private services compete for turf, and the gap widens between those who can afford transit convenience and those who can't.

Even the very nature of what a street is and whom it serves is up for debate.

Once again, the city is a laboratory.

How should we move?

Whose mobility counts?

What does it mean to be moving San Francisco?

♪♪ ♪♪ -Major funding for "Moving San Francisco" has been provided by a generous grant from Pitch and Cathie Johnson, with additional funding provided by these donors.

-I grew up in the Bay Area, and I've spent 50 years wandering San Francisco streets.

As a pedestrian, I've walked just about every corner.

As a bicyclist, I've gone up and down the hills.

And as a taxi driver, I found every conceivable shortcut through the streets.

Moving through a city tells you a lot, not just about where you're going, but about who we are.

You get a picture of how we solve problems, what we value, who gets to move, and who gets left out.

[ Trolley bell ringing ] It's true of transit today, and it's been true throughout the city's history.

Moving around San Francisco; how we do it, why we do it has helped define the character of the city.

And it will determine our success as we move forward into a very uncertain future.

If there's one thing that is certain about transportation in this city, it's that geography is destiny.

42 hills, more or less, surrounded on three sides by water.

♪♪ -Since the very founding of the city, the residents of San Francisco have been at the mercy of a landscape of some 42 hills.

Some of them small mountains, rising and falling precipitously within a space of just a few square miles.

So moving around, whether on foot, horse-drawn cart, streetcars, or automobiles, requires routes that tackle this unusual challenge.

But from the get-go, the streets of San Francisco, laid out by early engineers in a rational grid, have been at war with the landscape.

-Part of the magic of San Francisco is the absurdity of applying an orthogonal grid atop crazy topography.

In 1848, there were about 300 people here.

San Francisco grew with unprecedented rapidity, starting in 1849 after gold was discovered outside of Sacramento and in the years that followed.

-The city was driven in its early days by real-estate interests.

Surprise, surprise.

And it was those interests that took what was a very small street grid of rectangular blocks and expanded that grid so that regular-shaped lots could be sold for development.

-Jasper O'Farrell, who was 26 years old at the time, Irish immigrant, and happened to have some surveying skills, was just given the task, "Go lay out the city."

-O'Farrell adopted the prevailing approach to city planning in the Victorian era -- a regular Cartesian grid that extended across the entire hilly peninsula, even calling for leveling or blasting away obstacles like Rincon Hill.

On the city's steepest grades, O'Farrell and city planners stuck to the grid by engineering stairways, creating streets unfit for vehicles to this day.

-The grid, in addition to creating these utterly breathtaking and unexpected views as you come around the corner and you can see straight down the street all the way to the water.

It's breathtaking.

In normal cities, those breathtaking views are all private views.

At the street level, all you can see is the street wall.

And here in San Francisco, there are continually these long vistas that invite us to travel.

♪♪ -but Jasper O'Farrell's most lasting impact on San Francisco transit was his solution for integrating two competing grids -- creating a grand, central boulevard bisecting north and south grids -- Market Street.

-He dreamed big and had the temerity to make it 120 feet wide at a time when you had a few little alleys practically making up the entire streetscape of San Francisco.

-That ended up being very fateful for the future of transit.

Market Street, because of its width, was able to accommodate multiple private railway concessions.

-Over the next century, Market Street would become the primary transit seam of the city, with competing cable cars, streetcars, BART, subways, and ever-increasing car traffic.

Instead of a grand boulevard, it became a poster child for the often incompatible uses of an urban thoroughfare.

-Market Street, because of its configuration, had a remarkably long run that had a grade that future electric streetcars could tolerate.

The grade shapes everything about where neighborhood commercial districts ended up and interestingly as well, the grade requirement for a late-19th-century electric streetcar is also exactly the same grade requirement for a bicycle.

So, there's a funny convergence and a tension that we struggle with to this day.

How do we accommodate the need for bike facilities and also the need for transit priority on the same set of streets?

-In 2019, transit officials took a bold step -- closing Market Street to automobile traffic.

-The great part about the Market Street plan is we've thought about how we want to see the future of a transportation system.

And it's not focused on cars.

It's focused on transit, cycling, and walking.

And what that does is it presents this new opportunity to rethink the way we're using that land.

Where people not only work in those locations around Market Street, but they actually dwell there.

And that's a huge opportunity as we think about the future of San Francisco and particularly downtown.

-There's also this idea of rethinking sidewalks, safe places for people to walk.

So, we're thinking about designing our streets differently, again, as a way to be accommodating to people not just to vehicles.

I think that is essential.

San Francisco, as a city, has definitely led the way.

The whole Market Street initiative is a classic example of pushing forward and doing it in big ways, not just small ways.

-The lengthy effort to turn Market Street into a car-free zone has been contentious, taking years of negotiation.

But an equally dramatic change to the streets of San Francisco happened much more suddenly during the COVID crisis of 2020.

Instantly, streets all across San Francisco's hilly grid became outdoor pedestrian corridors for people looking for a little relief during lockdown.

-One of the things that COVID has allowed us to demonstrate is that when government has a clear mandate, and when pointless bureaucracy and regulation are stripped away, and when different silos work together, government can get [bleep] done.

At the SFMTA, we have very quickly implemented over 30 miles of slow streets.

And slow streets are a low infrastructure, like "throw up some barricades" approach, to make car traffic slow down, and say that people walking and biking and kids playing basketball in the middle of the street, those activities have priority.

They have been wildly successful.

They're getting about a 95% approval rating.

-While every slow street may not be permanent, their sudden success is just the latest twist in the city's ongoing redefinition of what a street is -- a grid interrupted by hills... a boulevard... a park, a haven.

Above all, a way for people to move, however they choose to do it.

-No matter how people use the streets of San Francisco to move around or gather, those streets will forever be associated with one particular form of transit.

It's San Francisco's signature, and it came about as a direct result of the terrain.

I'm talking, of course, about the cable cars.

♪♪ -In its early days, the city's hills and steep streets were still the most formidable obstacle to transportation across the growing metropolis.

Horses pulling heavy trams were constantly at risk of slipping on the steepest grades.

A Scottish engineer, Andrew Hallidie, had witnessed such an accident and thought of a better way.

Inspired by the endless ropeway he had invented to haul buckets of ore across mountainsides in the Sierra, Hallidie set out to run a moving cable under San Francisco's streets, which a trolley could grab hold of.

-It was a classic San Francisco summer morning -- foggy.

On the early morning of August 2, 1873, Andrew Hallidie and a small group of men gathered right here at Clay and Jones on the summit of Nob Hill to do the inaugural test run of the world's first cable car, the invention that many San Franciscans thought was a folly.

They were under time pressure.

The franchise had actually expired the night before, and they needed to get the thing tested.

A retired locomotive engineer named Jimmy Hewitt was supposed to be the grip man.

But at the last minute, he looked down this hill.

He looked down this long, 2,800-foot drop to Kearny Street, the 16% grade below us, and he chickened out.

He wouldn't do it.

So, Andrew Hallidie, who trusted his own rope the way he trusted his heartbeat, he'd invented it, seized the grip, climbed into the dummy car and began the world's first descent of this hill.

The age of the cable car had begun.

♪♪ ♪♪ This is the powerhouse of the San Francisco cable-car barn, the heart and soul of the system.

And these big, white wheels called sheaves are what pull the cable over the hills.

And they've turned it off, and they're about to turn them on again, and you'll observe these mighty wheels that pull miles of incredibly strong rope, as they call it, the cable, over the hills of San Francisco.

This system is an intricate, Rube Goldberg-like contraption with 2,400 moving parts and ample opportunity for things to go wrong.

They really have mastered a 19th-century technology that is, essentially, unchanged since Andrew Hallidie invented it in 1873.

Oh, we're freewheeling now because you got gravity working for you.

-Exactly.

Gravity is working for us.

We have no cable at this point.

-I see.

-And we will be able to pick up the cable around the corner.

-And has that been true since you left the barn, you've been free-- They call it freewheeling... Freewheeling.

-...since you left the barn.

-Using gravity.

-Okay.

-Now we're on our way.

-Al right.

-Hold on, guys.

Left turn.

-An ingenious grip on the bottom of the car grabs and releases the moving cable under the street.

-Now, how does this big brake work?

What does it do?

-Presses down on the track.

You've got 2x4s.

-Oh, okay.

-So when we're going forward, when we're going downhill, you will smell the burning aroma of wood.

-Oh, it's an actual 2x4?

-2x4.

-You go through those a lot.

-Yeah.

They change those probably about three or four times a week.

-And that friction slows the car down.

-Exactly.

A lot of tourists love that aroma, like a campfire.

[ Both laugh ] -We're rolling over Nob Hill.

And until the cable cars were invented in 1873, this was not the fancy residential area that it became.

It was rather deserted.

It was called a Sahara of desolation, but the cable cars made it possible to climb these steep hills.

And so all the Plutocrats began to build their mansions up on California Street.

Cable cars really altered the sociological, economic character of the city.

♪♪ ♪♪ So we're in the cable car barn, the heart and soul of San Francisco's cable-car system, three lines over about five miles of track.

It's a beautiful, deeply San Francisco place.

It's also a reminder.

There used to be 8 lines covering more than 50 miles.

They were all gathering at the Ferry Building.

It was a remarkable system of transportation that carried people all over San Francisco at the civilized speed of about 9 1/2 miles an hour.

It's about the speed of a bicyclist.

It's one of the most intimate and beloved forms of transportation ever invented.

-As iconic as the cable cars are to San Francisco's image, they nearly disappeared following World War II as the city pushed to modernize and replace them with buses.

-This is the cable-car turnaround at the end of the famous Hyde Street line and the sign behind me reads, "Friedel Klussmann Memorial Turnaround."

And 99% of the gazillions of people who line up for hours to catch the cable cars at this most popular of the lines probably have no idea who Friedel Klussmann is.

Well, she was one of San Francisco's great heroes.

She was largely responsible for saving the cable-car lines after Mayor Roger Lapham began his colossally misguided attempt to remove the cable cars in the name of progress and efficiency.

Klussmann, who was a socialite, the wife of a surgeon, lived on Telegraph Hill.

When she heard that they planned to get rid of the cable cars, she and her friends were outraged.

She said there was like a jolt of electricity ran through the room, and she began a concerted grassroots campaign to save the cable cars.

Lapham and his allies patronizingly dismissed their adversaries as a bunch of society ladies.

But in fact, they quickly realized that, as someone said, nothing sends fear into the heart of a politician as much as a bunch of well-dressed ladies striding up the steps of City Hall, which was exactly what Klussmann and her allies did.

And they prevailed.

-In 1947, Klussmann and her allies placed a referendum on the city ballot to save the cable cars.

Voters passed it overwhelmingly.

-Everyone who sees this name of Friedel Klussmann here, that's the story.

And everyone who loves the cable cars, owes her and the people that rose up in a grassroots movement a great debt of gratitude for saving this fantastic San Francisco institution.

The cable cars may be the most memorable and celebrated transit network in San Francisco, but they're just one of the transit systems that shaped the entire city.

That started long before the cable cars were even invented.

♪♪ -We're here at the top of Dolores Park in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, today, one of the city's most vibrant and bustling neighborhoods.

But in the city's early days, there was very little here.

There was the decaying, old mission.

There were a couple of bullrings and bars.

If you wanted to ride out here, 3 miles from downtown San Francisco, you took an old Spanish horse trail, which was so overhung with brush that would knock your hat off as you rode.

It wasn't an easy commute out here, but one thing changed all that -- San Francisco's first major transportation infrastructure.

It was called the Mission Plank Road.

-In 1850, Charles Wilson, a retired Army colonel, was running a successful shipping company, bringing passengers and freight from the boomtown of San Francisco upriver to the gold country.

But he recognized a business opportunity closer to home.

He began building, at his own expense, a wooden toll road to the Mission District, 3 miles long.

Wilson charged 25 cents per horse and $1 for a team and wagon.

-And it was immediately extremely popular.

People streamed out here -- at first, mostly just for Sunday outings, to go to the bars and the roadhouses and the breweries and visit the picturesque, old mission.

But as time went on, this road also led to the development of this area.

By the 1860s, this once very isolated, bucolic farming area became connected and part of the rest of the city of San Francisco.

-The Mission Plank Road would soon be paralleled by competing rail lines.

But it had proved that building a transportation link was the key to developing the city.

-This beautiful street with these gorgeous Victorian houses is part of the Mission District, which is one of San Francisco's two most famous streetcar suburbs.

Streetcar suburbs, as their name suggests, were parts of the city that were made possible to be developed by streetcar lines and by cable-car lines.

And often, the people that owned the streetcar lines also invested in the land around.

Streetcar suburbs really expanded the city.

In the 1880s, someone wrote that it was almost as if San Francisco had become three completely different cities -- the downtown, the Western addition, and the Mission.

And this was all because of streetcars, cable cars, and other forms of public transportation that made these areas accessible.

-Transit started off in San Francisco, not as a means of mobility, but as a real-estate development tool.

Every single neighborhood commercial district in San Francisco is there because a former streetcar or cable-car line ran there.

The entire geography of San Francisco -- its density patterns, where the commercial activities occur, where there are social gathering places -- all of that was shaped by transit.

-As the city grew denser through the 19th century and the need for housing swelled, land speculators soon looked to the sand dunes of the southwestern quarter for expansion.

But this region was cut off from downtown by a massive ridge of hills, impassable to trolleys.

Once again, it was a transit project that opened a connection.

This time, the city itself, not private enterprise, took the bold step -- building the Twin Peaks Tunnel.

-It was a really incredible undertaking.

It runs for 2 1/2 miles, most of it through solid rock.

The construction began in 1911.

It took about two and a half years to complete.

It's the longest streetcar tunnel in the world today.

When the tunnel was complete, Mayor Rolph led a parade through the tunnel from the Market Street end to the West Portal end.

There were grand celebrations.

There were real-estate agents all over the place telling people about the marvelous opportunities that now existed to build homes that would be easily connected to downtown San Francisco.

-But even as streetcar lines and tunnels opened up new stretches of the city for downtown commuters, San Francisco was still hemmed in on three sides by water.

So an entirely different transit network arose that kept the city bustling with commuters from across the region -- a network on the bay.

-60,000 people commuted into San Francisco by the ferries, twice a day -- 30 million people a year during the peak years of the ferries, which were between 1888 and about 1930.

In the absolute highest traffic year, there were 47 million people who rode the ferries.

You could take them all over the Bay Area.

The most popular routes were to Oakland and Berkeley in the East Bay.

You could go to Vallejo, Richmond, Sausalito, all over the Bay.

-Commuting to and from the city over water was fast and far-reaching.

Ferry rides could be as short as 6 minutes or as long as nearly 2 hours.

The ferry network spurred the rapid growth of towns in the East Bay, which soon boasted its own commuter-rail network, the Key System, whose massive pier cut the ferry trip from Oakland to just 18 minutes.

-What makes a transit system work is integration.

It's no use to have a robust ferry fleet if when you get somewhere, there's not the ground transportation available to take you to your destination.

And the Ferry Building, which we're approaching now, provided that kind of ground transportation in spades.

It was actually the second busiest transportation hub in the world after London's Charing Cross Station in the 1920s.

And when passengers disembarked from the hundreds of ferries, they found dozens of cable cars, streetcars, horse cars, taxis.

There's lines radiating out from the Ferry Building that would take them all over San Francisco rapidly and efficiently.

That kind of integrated system is what you need to make a transportation system work.

-But the heyday of the ferry was short-lived.

By the late 1930s, two new bridges spanned the bay.

Commuter trains, like the Key System, and transbay buses began pouring directly into the heart of the city, landing at a new hub, the Transbay Terminal, built far from the waterfront.

The romance of commuting by water would become a subject of nostalgia.

-Herb Caen put it best.

He said, "A bridge is just a bridge, a highway in the sky.

Ferry boats were close to the foaming heart of the matter, something to love."

[ Air horn blows ] -By the 1950s, Californians and transit developers were deep into another love affair -- the automobile.

They banned the Key System trains from the lower deck of the Bay Bridge, in favor of car traffic.

Government dollars soon poured in to construct ribbons of highways criss-crossing the city.

The 1951 Transitways Plan called for no fewer than 11 freeways to snake through the city.

One of them, the Embarcadero Freeway, sliced past the old Ferry Building, cutting off from view what had once been the proud gateway to the city.

This new concrete network of highways was poised to reshape not only how San Franciscans moved, but the very character of the city.

-This is Glen Canyon, one of the most unique and beautiful natural parks of San Francisco.

A deep gash running right through the heart of the city, with Islais Creek trickling through the base of it.

But this beautiful, bucolic place would have been completely profaned and largely destroyed by an enormous freeway that was planned to run through here.

-Among the city's 11 planned highways, the Crosstown Freeway would have barreled through Glen Canyon, disrupting the quiet neighborhood of Glen Park.

But in 1958, in this little hamlet, the city's massive transit plan collided head-on with a hard-headed neighborhood native.

Minnie Straub Baxter would be among the first to lead what would soon become a national trend -- the freeway revolt.

-Minnie Straub Baxter was the daughter of a well-known saloon keeper from the neighborhood, and she learned from the papers that they were planning to put a freeway through Glen Canyon.

She summoned a meeting, and 500 residents, neighbors, "glum and protesting" they were described as, showed up in the school auditorium to listen to her talk about it and they were all outraged and vowed to see what they could do to stop it.

Hitherto, there had never been any resistance to freeways anywhere in the United States, and they decided to question it.

And she actually went to Sacramento and delivered what became known as "the three-minute speech" in which she basically very pithily laid out how this would profane, destroy this charming neighborhood and this beautiful natural wonder in San Francisco.

-Minnie Baxter, joined later by a group of Glen Park organizers nicknamed the Gum Tree Girls, managed to rally enough support that the tide of public opinion began to change.

The board of supervisors eventually voted unanimously to reject the plan.

-We're here at a peaceful Glen Park street, called Rotteck, filled with the kind of eclectic San Francisco houses and neighborhood charm that Minnie Straub Baxter, and later the Gum Tree Girls, wanted to protect against freeways.

But as you walk out onto the street and look towards the end, you can see that not every street in this neighborhood was protected.

And many streets in San Francisco were bisected or erased.

And, of course, you can't stop all freeways from being built.

It's not even desirable to.

But often the people who get displaced and get their neighborhoods bisected are people with less privilege and less money, often people of color.

-When we're talking about equity, you're talking about disproportionate burdens that Black, indigenous people of color communities, low-income communities, vulnerable communities -- It's those communities that have been left behind.

Typically I would say in the Bay Area, what we've seen is that those Whiter, wealthier communities have had that power to say, "No, not in my backyard," which is a very NIMBY term to use.

And then there are communities that don't have that same power and same leverage, and often it is in their backyard, and they do bear those burdens.

-Freeways, rail lines, rapid transit -- sometimes the very systems designed to benefit suburban commuters have been built at the expense of urban communities of color.

-So, where we are is the Coliseum BART station.

It's pretty much an actual physical barrier between the residents and Martin Luther King Jr. Shoreline.

On this side is residential zoning.

And on this side, you have a lot of industrial zoning.

And this industrial zoning creates barriers to the people, the residents, actually getting to the shoreline.

-Correcting some of the wrongs of decades of Bay Area transit planning is the work of grassroots groups like the East Oakland Collective.

One current proposal -- a free zero-emission bus connecting the mainly African-American residents of East Oakland to the recreational Shoreline, long cut off from the neighborhood and nearly inaccessible by transit.

-It's not easy.

You have to cross a railroad track.

You have to cross a huge industrial area.

There's no easy way to navigate and get through.

Making those connections in a way that's accessible, easy to use, user-friendly, family-friendly, that's exactly what we need.

-But reconnecting communities divided by transit may require some radical thinking.

-We're not willing to dismantle places of oppression.

We kind of go, "Oh, this freeway was right here.

We can't build that rail or that bus line through that, because it's right there.

What are we gonna do, tear it down?"

"Yes.

You're gonna do that.

You're gonna tear it down."

I mean, case in point -- look at Hayes Valley now!

And that was all freeway that was there.

And then an earthquake damaged it.

And then, you see community residents saying, "we don't want a freeway here."

They did a whole proposition to get a freeway removed and guess what?

They won.

Once you can start to wrap your heads around, like, "We can dismantle things, we can take things apart, this is not static.

Transportation is not meant to be static."

You can create and reimagine what we want to see.

-When we think of most mass transit -- buses, trains, subways -- we take for granted that they're public systems paid for by taxpayers and open to the public.

But the public's right to ride wasn't always guaranteed.

In fact, one of the first civil rights battles over equal access to mass transportation happened right here in San Francisco.

♪♪ -Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 was the beginning.

-Nearly 100 years before Rosa Parks and the bus boycotts of the American South, a little-known African-American entrepreneur in San Francisco named Mary Ellen Pleasant stood up for her right to ride transit.

She had come to San Francisco at the height of the gold rush and began operating restaurants, boardinghouses, even brothels.

-She was so many things.

She had a very broad and deep understanding of how businesses worked.

Black women like Mary Ellen Pleasant were able to leverage all those skills while still playing into and working around these ideas and myths of who Black women were supposed to be, but using information to benefit themselves.

-And benefit she did.

With her business acumen and savvy investments, Mary Ellen Pleasant amassed a small fortune, Which she ploughed into anti-slavery causes, supporting the Underground Railroad, and even sending $30,000 to the radical abolitionist John Brown.

-$30,000 in 1859 is almost equivalent to a million dollars today.

And I think that it just says so much about her political power, her economic power, and her influence, not just in San Francisco, but on a national level.

-But no amount of influence could protect her from racism while she moved about the city's streets.

In 1866, she was removed from a private streetcar because she was Black.

And later the same year, on Folsom Street, a horse-drawn trolley refused to stop for her, even though she had a paid ticket.

-Although on paper, African-Americans might've had the right to ride, socially and in practice, very often it was compromised by the conditions that they rode in, whether they had to wait outside in weather or terrain, or whether they just got passed up.

And in this case, Mary Ellen Pleasant was just passed up on the train.

-Ever the activist, Mary Ellen Pleasant sued the transit company -- both for her right to ride and for $500 damages in emotional distress.

Her influential White friends had to testify on her behalf.

-This trial is significant for several reasons.

One, she understands that her legitimacy as a Black woman in the 1860s in San Francisco is not really enough to win the case.

And this is not even about the money for Mary Ellen Pleasant.

It's about setting a legal precedent; understanding that this case would set the tone for civil rights in the Bay Area and across the nation.

So, this is very strategic on her part and a part of a larger assault against racial injustice in San Francisco.

-The court ruled in her favor, declaring segregation on transit unconstitutional, but the victory was only partial.

On appeal, the California Supreme Court reversed the damages, so the ruling had no teeth.

That wouldn't come for 25 more years.

But Mary Ellen Pleasant had taken the first step on a long march.

-It shows that the civil rights movement doesn't happen in a vacuum, that there were women like Mary Ellen Pleasant, like Rosa Parks, who understood that the right to move, to move in space was crucial and quintessential to what it meant to be free, to what it meant to be a citizen in the United States.

-Even if the courts helped guarantee the right of people like Mary Ellen Pleasant to ride on a private trolley line, they couldn't loosen the tightening grip that the private transit companies held on 19th-century cities.

San Francisco would soon become a vanguard in the movement to make public transit truly public.

♪♪ -Urban transit systems in America started out being privately owned.

And they were owned by a variety of people initially, but when electricity came in, companies had started generating electricity for other purposes, realized that they could make more money by using it to power transportation systems that they themselves owned.

And that's what happened in San Francisco.

-As the city's population swelled in the late 1800s, private transit companies capitalized on the free-for-all, and large companies nationwide got into the business of city transportation.

-By 1900, you had proliferation of transit companies that have been consolidated into one by an outfit called United Railroads, which was out of Chicago.

-United Railroad had a stranglehold on the city's transit, and they bribed city supervisors and anyone they needed to in order to further their profits.

But in 1897, the city elected James Phelan as mayor on a platform of reform to address the city's rampant corruption and rewrite the city charter.

-Phelan argued that the only way to prevent corruption was through public ownership.

If they were simply regulated, rather than publicly owned, that those companies would then corrupt the city agencies that were regulating them.

But it was a long time coming.

-While the new city charter of 1900 required public ownership of transit, United Railroad poured money into city officials' pockets to rig the process in their favor.

It's a scheme that might have worked had not disaster struck.

[ Rumbling ] -The United Railroad was working really hard to establish a monopoly, and they were hit hard by the earthquake in 1906 and struggled to recover.

And in their panic for recovery, engaged in a lot of despicable labor practices and provided really bad transit service to San Franciscans.

-Citizen outrage at the monopoly was mounting.

And by 1907, transit workers themselves had joined the furor, demanding a pay raise and an 8-hour work day.

Talk of a strike loomed as railroad president Patrick Calhoun - suffering financial losses from the quake -- took matters to what would become a deadly new level.

[ Indistinct yelling ] -Calhoun brought in strike breakers from other parts of the country.

And he brought in hired guards, armed guards.

On May 7th, there was a shootout between Calhoun's guards and some union supporters that left 2 people dead and 20 wounded.

The strike lasted all through 1907 and into the early months of 1908, until the carmen's union called it off and said, "Okay, we give up, we've lost."

But the total toll was 6 dead and 250 people injured during the course of the strike.

-The public tide had turned against the monopoly.

In 1911, San Franciscans elected James "Sunny Jim" Rolph as mayor with a promise to build a better system.

-James Rolph said, "I want to start our own competitive public transit company owned by the people."

And got a bond passed.

And built what became known as Municipal Railway or Muni.

They expanded greatly first to serve the Panama Pacific International Exposition.

They bored a tunnel through Nob Hill on Stockton Street for streetcars primarily.

And that became a viable competitor, but much smaller than the private company.

And people took pride in Muni.

"These are our streetcars."

-San Francisco is really the leader in establishing public ownership of transportation, of streetcars and later buses.

San Francisco was doing this beginning in 1907.

New York didn't establish ownership of its subways until the 1930s.

And many other major cities didn't take that step until the early 1940s.

So, San Francisco was decades ahead of other major cities in terms of public ownership of public transportation.

-So, it's important to remember that Muni was born in a riot.

The riots around the United Railroad.

Later, we voted to tax ourselves an enormous amount of money at that time in order to buy up the railroads.

And we steadily put all of those private services out of business.

It took a few years, but we succeeded.

-But 75 years of a municipal transit monopoly has created its own set of problems.

-To be competitive, a public transit system is going to have to be predictable, reliable, affordable, and enjoyable.

Those are the big four.

That's a very high bar for most transit systems to reach today.

If you look at San Francisco in particular, the traffic patterns, congestion, other considerations make systems like Muni notoriously unreliable for quite a few San Franciscans.

-Today, Muni faces a proliferation of private transportation options now competing for its services.

Celebrating publicly-owned transit is increasingly rare.

-This sounds funny for us to say today and in a funny way, we're kind of rolling that back with transportation networking companies, where now many people choose to get in someone else's private automobile to be driven around and paid by computer.

-As trips in private vehicles have boomed, the crowded streets of San Francisco are once more contested turf.

The city is weighing transit-first strategies, such as charging drivers and ride-share vehicles more in certain crowded zones and times, called congestion pricing, and redesigning streets to discourage vehicle traffic.

-We, the people of San Francisco, own the streets.

The transportation system needs to completely rethink how we regulate the public right of way for the public good, and how we fund the most space-efficient forms of transportation, particularly high-capacity buses and trains.

-Encouraging travel on mass public transit networks instead of in private vehicles seems non-controversial.

But in the Bay Area, coordinating the region's competing transit systems has been a bureaucratic nightmare.

-We have 27 different entities planning transit service, which means that when you put all of those things together, they are less than the sum of their parts.

So, what we really need is the ability to do coordinated transit planning so that we have a comprehensive system that to the rider feels like one seamless system.

-It is not seamless.

For example, if someone has to go from Walnut Creek to San Francisco, they're going to take BART.

And then depending on where they end up in the city, may need to take Muni as well.

The trip from their point of view, it's a single trip.

And the provision of that trip should be with that single trip in mind.

You used to have to have a different fare payment system, your BART card and your Muni token.

Now, at least, we have a single-fare media, which is huge, but that was decades getting to that point.

-Equally challenging is bringing many modes of transit into one transfer point.

The new Transbay Terminal, built on the site of the old bus terminal in the shadow of the Salesforce Tower, took eight years to build.

Its aim, like the old Ferry Building, is integration, where travelers can easily find bus connections, commuter rail, ride shares, biking options, and the pleasures of walking.

Its urban garden floats three stories above the streets for the length of two city blocks.

-San Francisco's Transbay Terminal is a fantastically designed terminal.

It is beautiful.

It is a challenging location because it's slightly disconnected from the regional transportation system, as well as the local rail system.

There is a train box in it.

There is this vision in the very bottom of that facility of rail that would run to that location.

But right now, it's a missed opportunity and a missed connection.

-With so many obstacles to integrating public transport, with the rise of innovative private transit networks and corporate buses, and with the perilous decline in public transit ridership and revenue during the pandemic, the very survival of publicly-owned transit is in question.

-All public transit agencies in the United States have now entered the public transit death spiral.

The only way out of a death spiral is an infusion of cash that allows us to restore operations to a place where public transit again can compete with driving and other forms of transportation.

-What it requires is for us to commit to transit being the answer.

And that's a public commitment.

That means taking our tax dollars and making the system work.

-Some relief could come in the form of federal infrastructure funding.

But that won't answer the larger question -- Is public transit worth saving?

-I believe that a public transit system is critical to ensure that everyone who has to literally move from point "A" to point "B" can do so.

The economic and social disparities in this country alone speak to the need for public transit.

It's the accountability attached to the public part of that, that's so key.

Do we do it right all the time?

Do we get it right every single day?

No, but we're accountable to the outcome.

-Providing equitable access to transit for every community and population in the diverse Bay Area is a crucial goal for the future.

But how will we be moving around in 5 or 10, let alone 50 years?

The old-fashioned notion we have of transit from cable cars, buses, streetcars, and public networks, is rapidly changing.

Technology and the private sector will play an ever-larger role in the evolution of transit in the future.

♪♪ -25 miles to the east of San Francisco, the future of transit is unfolding.

At the Bishop Ranch office park, an innovative transit agency is testing the next iteration of transit technology -- automated vehicles.

These driverless shuttles may provide a long-sought solution to a thorny problem -- connecting suburban residents to mass transit corridors.

-The idea is these vehicles can go out into the neighborhoods, pick up people that actually want to go to either BART station and they won't have to drive.

It's gonna solve a first and last miles issue.

And then bring them here to the center part and then bring workers in, drop them off.

-This new ride-share technology has the potential to replace existing diesel buses with a 24/7, on-demand service.

-The autonomous shuttle is a vehicle.

It doesn't have a steering wheel.

It doesn't have a brake pedal.

It's all driven based on precision-based mapping and sensors.

The advantage here is in the future, there'll be an on-demand guaranteed-ride service, but it doesn't require an operator.

And so we're trying to get people into the bus, into BART, and change the way they drive to work and recreate.

-It's not only commuters who may benefit from autonomous vehicles.

In the Walnut Creek retirement community of Rossmoor, the Contra-Costa Transit Authority is beta-testing a driverless shuttle service specifically for seniors.

-As we all get older, we lose our sight, we lose our hearing, we lose our mobility.

You can become isolated.

It might even be frightening to get in a car and drive somewhere.

Then you're fearful that you're gonna lose these things.

It was clear to me that this technology could have a great benefit to the senior population and especially in an active adult community like Rossmoor.

-While Rossmoor has its own shuttle service to help get residents around, it's limited, so seniors who don't -- or shouldn't -- drive can start to feel their independence slipping.

-It's very inconvenient when you don't have a car.

I love running errands.

I love to go see my grandson and help babysit him at nighttime, weekends, and that kind of thing.

So it's -- it just -- Your life changes because you don't have that flexibility of going when you want to.

It takes two or three times longer to get to where you want to be.

-The program that CCTA is piloting could give seniors more mobility with an on-demand driverless shuttle that picks them up right at home and connects to other local transit.

Randy Iwasaki took a small group from Rossmoor on their first autonomous shuttle ride to experience driverless technology first-hand.

-The idea that we have for this vehicle is it's a first and last mile connector to transit.

This vehicle is low speed.

It'll go 25 miles an hour or less.

It's electric, so it's clean and it's quiet.

-So, would you ride it when it comes to Rossmoor?

-Yes.

For sure.

-Oh, definitely.

-I would ride it as long as I can call up, get it on demand, and it will take me where I want to go.

-Driverless cars are deeply rooted in the American imagination.

Science fiction is filled with images of what that future might look like.

That technology is here, and several companies have spent millions to roll it out onto San Francisco city streets.

-Autonomous vehicles have a huge amount of potential to solve particularly our safety problems.

About 40 people a year die in San Francisco from entirely preventable traffic crashes because we let distractible humans careen around at 50 miles an hour in 2-ton metal boxes.

-Using sophisticated sensors equipped with sonar, radar, lidar, and cameras, autonomous vehicles are literally mapping and analyzing every street and potential obstacle and hazard.

And with artificial intelligence, the cars have learned how to respond to their environment, distinguishing everything around them, including pedestrians, bikes, buses, and other cars.

-Companies like Cruise Automation are exploring automated vehicles in San Francisco, and they're doing so in a way that really could interact with transit.

In that it provides this opportunity to meet these last segments of a trip or these first segments of a trip and connect to rail, connect to bus lines, in a way that we might actually fill gaps in the network.

-Autonomous vehicles are now poised to become permanently woven into the urban fabric as an eco-friendly and convenient transit option.

But serious questions remain about their unintended consequences.

-Autonomous vehicles left to unregulated private industry will result in a dramatic increase in vehicle miles traveled and therefore severe traffic congestion.

They will also wipe out public transit unless public transit is given dedicated right of way.

-I think before we kind of run and jump and say, "This is the new thing, and it's gonna be amazing and we're gonna have all electric, all autonomous, and it's gonna be great, and we're just gonna reduce all these emissions," It's like, "Don't just think about your climate bottom line.

Think about your equity implications.

Do you have a credit card?

Do you have a phone?

Do you have access?"

How are we building in, like, structures of accountability and really thinking through the implications?

-As technology continues to redefine what it means to move through a city, the streets of San Francisco, once again, have turned into a laboratory for the future of mobility.

-San Francisco has continued to be one of the most innovative places on the planet.

We will continue to reinvent our transit systems.

We will take on some of these thorny, wicked problems, these challenges that our cities face, and we'll use transit to try to solve them.

-The dystopian version in my mind is one person sitting in the back of a car, on a screen, for hours.

That, I think, is one of the elements that leads to our continued social fracturing, our continued isolation.

In my mind, the direct antidote to that is actually being together.

So it's the reason that cities are important because we have the ability to meet the other and stop having fear of the other.

But it's also why transit is important because transit is a leveler.

Transit is a doorway.

Transit is a place where people of all different backgrounds can come together and move to the places they need to or want to occupy.

♪♪ -Thinking outside the box has pointed the way for this region to overcome nearly insurmountable obstacles in the way we move around.

From Andrew Hallidie's brainstorm of a cable underground to Mary Ellen Pleasant's insistence that she had a right to ride, to the idea that the public should own their transit systems, to slow streets, closed streets, and the latest post-COVID innovations.

It's been a constant push to help make this city a livable place where all have the freedom to move around.

That story is still unfolding, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

The way we collectively innovate today will determine the quality of life in this region far into the future.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Major funding for "Moving San Francisco" has been provided by a generous grant from Pitch and Cathie Johnson, with additional funding provided by these donors.