Remember when Muni's vintage streetcars were actually part of the city's charm? Those old beauties — the historic F-line cars, the colorful fleet from transit systems around the world — used to clang through the streets with a regularity that made San Francisco feel like, well, San Francisco.

So where'd they all go?

Muni officially maintains that most of these vintage vehicles are operational. Great. Wonderful. But "operational" and "actually operating" are two very different things, and San Franciscans have noticed the gap. Pre-Covid, spotting a Milan streetcar or a vintage PCC rolling down Market Street was practically a daily occurrence. Now? Ghost town.

This is a pattern we see over and over with SFMTA. Assets that the public paid for — and continues to pay to maintain — sit idle while the agency insists everything is fine. It's the municipal equivalent of that friend who says they're "basically fluent" in Spanish because they took two semesters in college.

Let's talk dollars and cents. Maintaining a fleet of historic streetcars isn't cheap. These aren't Teslas you can just plug in overnight. They require specialized parts, skilled mechanics, and dedicated maintenance facilities. If they're truly operational but not running routes, we're spending money to keep them in working order... for what exactly? A rainy day? A parade?

And if they're not actually operational — if "mostly all operational" is doing some very heavy lifting in that sentence — then someone at SFMTA needs to level with taxpayers about the real state of the fleet and what it would cost to get these cars back on the rails.

San Francisco's historic streetcar fleet is one of the few transit assets in this city that both residents and tourists genuinely love. It's good for ridership, good for tourism revenue, and good for the city's identity. Letting them collect dust in a barn while telling the public they're ready to roll is exactly the kind of quiet institutional decay that erodes trust in government.

Put the cars back on the tracks or tell us why you can't. It's that simple.