The inaugural season of baseball at Pac Bell Park is a dream come true for baseball fans. Intoxicated by a winning team playing in an incomparably beautiful ballpark, few fans, and fewer still of the public at large, appreciate how important a role ferry service played in making it all possible.
Published: October, 2000
The inaugural season of baseball at Pac Bell Park is a dream come true for baseball fans. Intoxicated by a winning team playing in an incomparably beautiful ballpark, few fans, and fewer still of the public at large, appreciate how important a role ferry service played in making it all possible.
The San Francisco Giants had to agree to include a ferry terminal in order to get permission to build the ballpark to calm fears of traffic gridlock. Port of San Francisco officials, notably Veronica Sanchez, head of Government Affairs, scared up $2 million dollars from the Federal Transit Administration and the Port itself kicked in another half million. These funds were used to install two landing docks for ferries alongside the Park (called, in maritime circles, "floats"). The second of these floats was installed in August, replacing a temporary float across Willie McCovey Cove.
The Port was thinking further ahead than just ballpark service when it went after funding for ferry service to Pac Bell Park. Importantly, the ferry stop at Pac Bell Park will serve the huge new Mission Bay development now under construction. Regular commuter service can be expected in the next few years. The Mission Bay complex will include office, residential and commercial development and also be home to the University of California at San Francisco’s Biomedical facilities. UCSF actively supported the Port in the search for federal dollars to make possible the Pac Bell Park ferry terminal.
Ferry service to Pac Bell Park alone has been hugely successful with fans making over 100,000 trips via ferry to watch the Giants steamroll their way towards a Division championship. So many people want to go to games by ferry that ferry fleet’s capacity has been seriously strained. Every major ferry line has new ferryboats on order, in part because of the demand created by Pac Bell Park.
"We’re just knocked out by the fantastic reaction we’ve had from fans and ferryriders alike to our ballpark service", croons Ron Duckhorn, President of the Blue and Gold fleet which took a leading role in sorting out the complex logistics of meshing commuter and ballpark service. "Alameda/Oakland, Tiburon, Sausalito: we’re seeing big and increasing numbers from all our points of service".
The overwhelming public response to Pac Bell ferry service lends mighty momentum to plans for increased water transit. With Bay highways near paralysis from overuse and environmentalists unwilling to budge on expensive new emissions controls, the demise of the suburban/urban commute paradigm is an actuarial fact. Huge bureaucracies determined to preserve the flailing status quo, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, for example, and the road and car builders it represents, can no more stand in the way than did the Berlin Wall the fall of Communism.
The success of Pac Bell Park points the way to what we shall be experiencing much more and more in the not-so-distant future: people living in compact waterside communities using safe and environmentally friendly water transit to commute to work and play. It’s already a jewel in the crown of the Bay’s maritime operations. Indeed, the Port of San Francisco is the only US port to claim a major league baseball team as a tenant. As a result, enormous public attention is being drawn to all the dynamic activity of the San Francisco waterfront, ferries first and foremost,
In the best and most optimistic sense, each joyful trip by a Giants fan to a game is a repudiation of forty-years of obsessive road and car building and the environmental and social debacle that resulted. Anyone taking the ferry to a ballgame – or anywhere else, for that matter – knows that life after cars isn’t only possible: it’s preferable.
