Borax King and Key System in East Bay
Historical Essay
by David D. Schmidt, 2026
An excerpt from the book, San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History, by David D. Schmidt (Backcountry Press, 2025).
View east from Beach Street near 40th Street in Oakland. Key System underpass route to the Bay Bridge, July 23, 1937.
Photo: SFMemory.org sfm003-10534
The East Bay’s first electric streetcar system astonished residents when it started operating on May 12, 1891. The cars ran from the University of California in Berkeley to north Oakland. By 1894, with 98 miles of track on several competing lines, the East Bay had transit lines stretching from Richmond to Hayward.
Each company had its own separate tracks, cars and power plants. Francis Marion Smith, known as “the Borax King” for making his fortune in borax mining, bought up the competing lines and consolidated them. By 1898, he had all but one of the East Bay's transit lines under his Oakland Transit Company, later known as the Key System. By 1903, passengers on his streetcars (and ferries) traveled from UC Berkeley to San Francisco in 36 minutes—faster than commuters today.
Key System map, early 20th century
After the Bay Bridge opened in 1936, more and more people used private cars to cross the bay, which meant fewer passengers—and less revenue—for the Key System, despite the opening of its new electric trains on the lower deck of the bridge in 1939. These trains could transport more people per hour than all the cars on the bridge.
The weakened Key System was sold in May 1946 to Pacific City Lines, a company controlled by General Motors (GM), Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., Phillips Petroleum, Standard Oil of California, and Mack Manufacturing Co. (Mack trucks). By November 1948, Pacific City Lines had replaced all of the East Bay’s electric streetcars with air-polluting diesel buses.
In March 1949, a jury convicted GM, Standard Oil of California, Firestone, Pacific City Lines and others of violating the federal Sherman Antitrust Act by conspiring to monopolize sales of buses, fuel, and tires to local transit companies throughout the U.S. The guilty companies paid wrist-slap fines of $5,000 each, which did nothing to restore the rail transit systems they dismantled in the East Bay and 45 other cities.
Key System trains continued to run on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. By 1954, cars were carrying an estimated 49 million people across the bridge annually, while train riders declined to 11 million—though the trains still carried 40% of rush hour commuters. In January 1955, Pacific City Lines petitioned the California Public Utilities Commission to be allowed to replace the trains with buses. The PUC approved the conversion in December 1956.
By this time a regional agency, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Commission, was already drawing up plans for BART. Governor Goodwin Knight signed a bill in June 1957 to build the new rail system. Pacific City Lines moved quickly to block BART’s potential use of the bridge, ending Bay Bridge train service on April 20, 1958, and immediately ripping out the tracks. Workers shoved the rails off the side of the bridge and into the bay. The train's path was quickly paved for buses, and in 1959, the bus lanes were opened to all traffic.
In 1960, Pacific City Lines sold the remains of the Key System—its bus lines—to AC Transit (a joint agency of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties), which still operates them.
Questions? Email the author: davidnaturesf@gmail.com
Excerpted from David D. Schmidt's San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History. Available from Backcountry Press.