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.”