First, let me say that I love San Francisco-I never tire of visiting that city. However, I have always wondered why the city is no longer a big port-when you walk along the embarcadero, you see pier after pier-with empty warhouses. I have never seen a ship docked on the embarcadero at all!
Why is this-it seems to be well siyuated, and has good access. A while back, somebody tod me that the largest west coast ports are Seattle/Tacoma, and Oakland.
Does anybody know what caused the decline of SF as a port city?
I don’t know. But … I would suspect that San Francisco’s political and economic establishment was so enthralled with contemplating how wonderful San Francisco is compared to, say, Los Angeles that they forget to keep up.
Simple SF is too small. It has only 49 sq miles. Other than NYC it has the largest Population density in America. LA is HUGE. Oakland, and San Jose are much bigger in land area compared to SF.
Ports need good rail and road connections. It is cheaper to have these across they bay in Oakland rather than in San Francisco.
Most of SF Bay is very shallow. To create the port of Oakland as it is now, channels had to be dredged, at which point the advantages of using that side of the bay could be realized. A project is currently underway to dredge the Port of Oakland harbor to a 50 foot depth, allowing it to accomodate the bigger container ships.
Earlier in history, SF would have been developed rather than inner harbors. Even in the earlier days, when commercial shipping had shallower draft, a ship venturing into the interior of the bay risked getting hung up on things like the Berkeley reef.
BTW, San Jose isn’t really a port. They annexed Alviso, which makes them a port technically, but Alviso’s channel was allowed to fill, and I doubt that you could navigate a rowboat to it nowdays.
When you look at the Bay Area on a map, realize that the whole South Bay is very shallow, and ringed by huge wide mud flats. Redwood City is the only deepwater port in the South Bay, and it is obviously the result of extensive dredging efforts as well.
Port of San Francisco web site
Also see their website and the development plans on the drawing board above. The overall theme is that future port development is seen as more of an environmental trust, lifestyle and tourist attraction issue than how to be a competitive port. I get the impression that SF isn’t really too interested in future “big shoulders” port development and given the economic direction of the city really doesn’t need to be.
San Francisco never seemed that interested in developing a big port that could handle container ships and the like.
Oakland seemed to be more interested in making money off of its port rather than its tourist trade.
The Port of Los Angeles handles more tonnage than any other port in the US. The combined Los Angeles/Long Beach port is out of sight.
This site gives New York 55 million metric tons in 1997.
This site gives Los Angeles 100 million metric tons in 2000. Not exactly comparable in years but you get the idea.
This site gives Seattle as about 15 million metric tons.
Just to keep the record straight.
Add to the above:
Those docks you see abandoned along SF shoreline were often used for passenger ships. Up until the 1960s, that was still big business. Unloading people is relatively easy. Unloading freight containers requires lots of space (as can be seen across the bay in Alameda).
I think there was some fear on the part of the navy (correct me if I’m wrong) that putting all of the fleet where the weather was often poor, where all access was through one narrow channel, was unwise. Hence the popularity of San Diego.
Also, cities do have to make decisions about what kind of business to attract. The people in the Bay Area, for many decades concerned about quality of life and the environment, have tended to shy away from the heavy industry that turned Los Angeles into a polluted, sprawling, congested, and IMHO ugly city. They can have the shipping. We’ll keep the computer industry.
To follow with what David Simmons said, the Los Angeles/Long Beach Complex is the third largest seaport in the world.
Cite.
As noted, the ground transportation is the killer - if you unload in SF, you have to truck the stuff across the bridge, then load it onto trains. Not nearly as attractive as putting it directly in a boxcar.
So, SF was a passenger terminal long before the idea of containerized freight came along.
When the cruise ships went out of business, so did the port of SF.
(and, SF has a long histroy of run-ins with the military. When uncle ronnie wanted to home-base the uss missouri (WW II battleship - absolutely useless) here, we put it on the ballot. it lost. the navy then removed all remaining ships from SF.)
and, every once in a while, a ship will dock - have no idea why, but a few small ones still do.
what will happen to the embarcadero is pretty much anybody’s guess - SF politics are pretty byzantine, and that chunk of real estate is highly desirable. The one thing that nobody wants is to turn it into a cargo port - Oakland can have that business.
and next time you visit - see if you can find the fireboats (SF maintains 2)
Port technology changed around fifty years ago. Most cargo ships now use container storage, which requires special loading and unloading equipment at the docks. Some ports decided to go to the expense of converting to the new technology; others didn’t and found themselves being eclipsed as container shipping came to dominate ocean transport. My guess is San Francisco was one of the ports that decided not to modernize.
Didn’t the either/both of Long Beach and Los Angeles open a brand-new set of loading docks at the port recently? As in, within the past couple of weeks?
I seem to recall hearing/reading about how this latest set of super-cranes would make the nation’s uber-port even more spectactular.
My commute is on the 710 freeway, which is the road that many/most of those containers get trucked out of the ports on. The volume of big-rigs there is starting to cause serious problems, both in terms of simple traffic congestion and long-term damage to the road (it’s a tooth-jarring ride).
L.A.just completed a set of dedicated rail lines (The Alameda Corridor) for the transportation of freight to and from the Port. Much of it is underground, or at least below grade, and it’s supposed to reduce the need for heavy trucks to do the job. Whether it will do that I doubt, but it should certainly help increase port capacity. Now if we could just get some more sets of rails to move people…
Actually from what I hear the lofe of the merchant seaman is no longer what it was. Ships get turned around in a few hours, not days, so that the seamen have little time for R&R during port calls. Add that to the size of those container ships and you can see that the major ports handle immense amounts of cargo, far beyond what anyone could have imagined only a few decades ago.
Those damned sour grapes are no good anyway.
you can have the shipping.
and the smog.
really.
we’re NOT jealous about either of those.
but you do have some pretty beaches (or have you polluted those beyond recognition, too?)
Actually, IIRC, containerized shipping is the culprit. Years ago, ships used pallettes to ship product. That’s what’s always being hauled in the movies, usually wrapped in webbing. It’s called break-bulk shipping. It doesn’t need much land space to support the shipping. The product could be stored in the pier buildings you see along SF’s Embarcadero.
Containerized shipping requires a large amount of space behind the port to manage the containers (they’re about the size of a semi trailer). If you look at Oakland across the bay, it had plenty of room to expand, so it took over as the Bay area’s shipping port. Drive by on 880, and you can see miles of containers. By the time shipping switched from break-bulk to containerized, the SF piers had been built right up to. There was no room to manage the containers, so SF got shoved out. NOW, the only things that generally come and go are smaller freighters (they still use break-bulk for shipping smaller units of goods), and passenger liners, that can afford to come and go from SF, which looks a lot better than shipping out among the freight over in Oakland.
BTW, SF is getting back into the freight shipping game, what with Hunter’s Point being converted from a naval base to a shipping hub. But odds are against SF becoming a major shipping port again. Short answer: no room.
Very interesting observation. Containers are such a major business that Jane’s publishes one of their annuals about it. Can’t say it includes much about the social and economic effect, though. Quite apart from a conscious decision made by SF, containerization must have had a devastating effect on third world ports. Or did it? Can’t very small ports manage to take off a container or two with an old-fashioned crane? Hmmm. I guess the problem is mostly that the container ships need deep water… big docks…
Ahh! That’s only true if you exclude cities under 500,000. Here are US cities with a total population of over 50,000 listed by citywide density.
Dang, I meant this quote: