The cable cars are purely a tourist attraction. Waiting times can exceed an hour, so nobody uses them to commute. The rest of SF Muni is a joke. Average fleet speed is 8mph and has been declining. On one Sunday workout, I outran an express line from its start to finish. Anyone on a bicycle can beat Muni in price, speed, and convenience. The situation would be comical if it didn't cost taxpayers $800 million per year.

Much of it? Not even close. Here’s a map from 1914. Thin red lines are street cars: http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~21...

These days we mostly have a combination of a few places connected to BART/Muni, and the rest handled by buses and trolleybuses, which are in general incredibly slow, because they get stuck in car traffic and make frequent long stops to load and unload passengers. There are a couple of cable cars, and one restored streetcar line, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Market_%26_Wharves, but they’re mostly kept that way as tourist attractions and curiosities.

The F gets used quite a bit by locals to commute.

Toronto still has a fairly extensive streetcar network. A few former routes have been closed, but that's mostly because they were replaced by Subway lines. The Streetcar network was expanded as recently as the 1990s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_streetcar_system

With regards to the lost streetcar routes: http://www.blogto.com/city/2015/01/5_lost_streetcar_routes_i...