How do I get around San Francisco?

Buy a Clipper card at any Walgreens or BART station kiosk for $3 and load $20 to start. It scans on Muni buses, Muni Metro light rail, BART, and the Golden Gate Ferry. Muni costs $2.50 per tap with free transfers for 2 hours, which covers most in-city movement. The N-Judah line from the Sunset through downtown to Oracle Park is the route you'll likely ride most. BART is the airport train. SFO to Powell Street station takes about 30 minutes and costs around $9.65. The BART cars smell like old upholstery and the stations feel like 1970s concrete bunkers, because they are, but the system works and runs until midnight. One thing to watch. BART and Muni share four downtown stations, Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell, and Civic Center, on separate platforms. If you tap into BART by mistake for a Muni trip, you'll pay BART's higher distance-based fare. Look for the red Muni gates, not the blue BART ones.

San Francisco is 7 miles by 7 miles. On a map, everything looks walkable. Then you hit the hills. The climb from North Beach up to Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill will leave your calves burning after 10 minutes. The grade on Filbert Street near Leavenworth reportedly reaches 31.5%, one of the steepest paved roads in the country. Uber and Lyft both started here, and they remain the best tool for hill-dodging. A ride from the Castro to Fisherman's Wharf runs about $15-20 and takes 15 minutes. That said, the flat corridors reward walking. The Embarcadero from the Ferry Building south toward Oracle Park is a 2-mile waterfront stretch with salt air and the bark of sea lions drifting from Pier 39. The Mission District between 16th and 24th Streets stays flat and runs dense with taquerias, murals on Balmy Alley, and the warm smell of fresh pan dulce from La Palma Mexicatessen on 24th Street.

Three cable car lines still operate in San Francisco. The Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason lines start at the turnaround at Powell and Market Streets, where you'll find 40-80 people waiting most mornings by 10am. The California Street line is the local secret. It starts near the Embarcadero, runs through Chinatown and over Nob Hill, and rarely has more than a 5-minute wait. Each ride costs $8 with no transfer credit. The wooden bench vibrates beneath you as the grip catches the cable under the street, and you can smell the grease from the winding house on Mason Street. Worth doing once. But if someone tells you to ride the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf, know that walking downhill from Powell Station takes 20 minutes, while the cable car takes 25 after you've waited 45 in line.

For your first day, keep it simple. The F-Market heritage streetcar runs vintage 1940s-era PCC cars from the Castro down Market Street to Fisherman's Wharf for the standard $2.50 Muni fare. It stays above ground the whole way, so you watch the neighborhoods shift block by block. The 30-Stockton bus threads through Chinatown on Stockton Street, where you can hear vendors calling out prices for live crab and bok choy through the windows. Avoid renting a car. Parking downtown runs $30-50 per day in a garage, street parking has a 2-hour limit enforced by SFMTA officers who seem to appear from nowhere, and the one-way grid in SoMa will have you circling the same 4 blocks. If you need wheels for Muir Woods or Sonoma County, rent for that single day from an office near Union Square and return same evening.