Welcome to San Francisco from SFMTA!

JULIE KIRSCHBAUM
Director of Transportation
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA)

On behalf of the 6,000 employees of the SFMTA, I’d like to welcome you to San Francisco for the 2025 APTA Rail Conference. We are honored to co-host the event this year with our partners at the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART).

As the gateway to the Asia pacific, home to world–renowned culinary institutions, landmark destinations, and historical movements rooted in our city that have inspired the world, San Francisco is a city that draws and welcomes people from everywhere. From the gold rush to the invention of the cable car, blue jeans, television, and now the AI capital of the world, we are a city of firsts.

This spirit of innovation is so deeply rooted in not just our city’s history, but in our culture that has shaped the SFMTA’s approach to transportation planning and implementation. The famed engineer Andrew Smith Hallidie found the sight of horses struggling up our infamously steep hills so disturbing that he adapted his mining conveyor system to haul streetcars. And so, in 1873, the first cable cars were born right here. More than 150 years later, San Francisco remains the last city in the world to operate them, and we encourage you to enjoy any or all the three cable car lines in service during your visit. I hope many of you get a chance to take part in our technical tour behind the scenes of how they operate.

We operate one of the most diverse fleets at the SFMTA, with rail technology from almost every decade since the 1870s to the present. We run our cable cars, a fleet of historic streetcars both from our own past and from streetcar systems around the world, and some of the latest in light rail vehicle technology that runs on our Muni Metro system now.

About half a million people ride Muni trains and buses every weekday to get to work, school, parks, and tourist attractions, and Muni carries about 50 percent of the nine-county Bay Area’s regional transit ridership.

We are so proud of all we have accomplished and are so excited to share with you all the attributes that make San Francisco so unique, that people from around the world come to enjoy.

On behalf of over 6,000 hardworking SFMTA employees, I want to thank APTA for organizing this invaluable learning and networking conference for our industry, and for choosing San Francisco as the host city. We at the SFMTA, along with our partners at BART, look forward to hosting the 2025 APTA Rail Conference attendees and hope you enjoy your visit in San Francisco. Welcome!