Doorey Chung of Oakland rides a ferry from San Francisco to Oakland in 2023. Traveling by ferry was common in the Bay Area until car ownership became widespread.

If you ever want to treat yourself to an eclectic visual history of the Bay Area, go see “Lost Landscapes of San Francisco.” Rick Prelinger, an archivist and founder of the Prelinger Archives of moving images, spliced together a dizzying array of footage documenting the everyday and the extraordinary bits of the city’s history. 

It’s a nostalgia bomb going back to the advent of film. But watching it, as I did last week at a 20th anniversary screening, can also be quite sobering over what’s been lost.

I was particularly struck by images of the region’s extensive and multilayered transit network, anchored by cable car lines beginning in 1873, and the vast electric streetcar system that peaked in the early 20th century. San Francisco was covered by surface railway lines. Electric trains crossed the lower deck of the Bay Bridge from 1939 to 1958. (Can you imagine?!)

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Meanwhile, the Ferry Building was once one of the world’s busiest central maritime hubs before car ownership became more widespread and the construction of the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge shifted most travel to personal cars. After the film, I went back and read about how the bridge’s board of directors considered the ferry as competition for revenue and fought it hard. Ferry services were shuttered in 1958, and most maritime activity shifted to Oakland.

We’re obviously not getting all this transit back. But as recent data from the Dutch analytics company TomTom showed, San Francisco traffic has never been worse. We need more ways to get........

© San Francisco Chronicle