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Yes, SF really is hilly
Mar. 16th, 2004 05:46 pmA fun day today - I had the radio interview early in the afternoon, which went well - the hosts were gratifyingly clueful. I wandered around Berkeley before that for a couple of hours.
Afterwards, headed into SF itself. Caught the cable-cars up California St - what a wonderfully low-low-tech piece of hardware they are. The cars themselves are about as simple as you could imagine - a box on wheels,
with a couple of clamps that go down into the street. The driver squeezes the clamp, and it connects to a cable that's always moving, and that drags the car along. If there's a simpler piece of technology in use on public transport, I don't know what it is.
SF itself seems to have decided that public transportation is a good thing, but they can't decide which form they want. So we get multiple train systems, with what looked like incompatible trains, buses, electric busses running off overhead powerlines, the cable cars, and a tram line proper that runs around the pier area. About the only form I haven't seen is jetpacks that you can rent by the hour. The trams on this latter line have been looted from various citites across the US which removed their trams. Yay for the auto-makers and friends who destroyed alternative competition! But yay for San Francisco for saving some of them, at least.
Around Pier 39 (which is really a giant magnet for extracting money from tourists) there's an amazingly large sea lion colony. Apparently they just moved in one day and gradually expanded and expanded. It looks like the little harbour is full of small rocky islands, until you realise that it's actually floating wooden platforms just covered in sea lions. They're about as lazy as you'd expect - particularly on another brilliantly sunny day like today.
Yes, photos will be coming - I probably won't get them up until the weekend, unless I lug the laptop along to a coffee shop that has wireless, or something.
Tomorrow, it's off to the exploratorium, and lots more wandering around... whee!
Afterwards, headed into SF itself. Caught the cable-cars up California St - what a wonderfully low-low-tech piece of hardware they are. The cars themselves are about as simple as you could imagine - a box on wheels,
with a couple of clamps that go down into the street. The driver squeezes the clamp, and it connects to a cable that's always moving, and that drags the car along. If there's a simpler piece of technology in use on public transport, I don't know what it is.
SF itself seems to have decided that public transportation is a good thing, but they can't decide which form they want. So we get multiple train systems, with what looked like incompatible trains, buses, electric busses running off overhead powerlines, the cable cars, and a tram line proper that runs around the pier area. About the only form I haven't seen is jetpacks that you can rent by the hour. The trams on this latter line have been looted from various citites across the US which removed their trams. Yay for the auto-makers and friends who destroyed alternative competition! But yay for San Francisco for saving some of them, at least.
Around Pier 39 (which is really a giant magnet for extracting money from tourists) there's an amazingly large sea lion colony. Apparently they just moved in one day and gradually expanded and expanded. It looks like the little harbour is full of small rocky islands, until you realise that it's actually floating wooden platforms just covered in sea lions. They're about as lazy as you'd expect - particularly on another brilliantly sunny day like today.
Yes, photos will be coming - I probably won't get them up until the weekend, unless I lug the laptop along to a coffee shop that has wireless, or something.
Tomorrow, it's off to the exploratorium, and lots more wandering around... whee!
