More than 100,000 people crowded San Francisco\u2019s waterfront Saturday for the Fourth of July fireworks show, but getting home proved to be a grueling ordeal as transit systems and city streets were pushed far beyond capacity.<\/p>\n
Riders reported that typical 30-minute trips stretched into waits of two to four hours. BART lines wrapped around stations, Caltrain platforms were packed and stalled Waymo autonomous vehicles caused further gridlock in downtown streets.<\/p>\n
City leaders and transit agencies admitted that major adjustments are needed before San Francisco hosts another large-scale event.<\/p>\n
“Our transportation system simply could not handle the volume of people that arrived in San Francisco on Saturday,” said Viktoriya Wise of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. <\/p>\n
The SFMTA reported 41,000 more boardings than last Fourth of July \u2014 a 13% increase that caused some trips to take two to three times longer than normal.<\/p>\n
“We did everything we could to move as many people as possible and made adjustments in the field to our transit operations to pull additional service and get people home as quickly as we possibly could,” Wise said.<\/p>\n
BART rider Gloria Zhu described the chaotic scene at the stations. <\/p>\n
“There\u2019s only so much you can do before you just kind of accept your fate,” Zhu said. “It was just push and shove into the trains, so we moved with the people and hoped to get on a train before the last one was out.”<\/p>\n
Caltrain also faced an unexpected surge, carrying more than 14,000 riders and prompting officials to scramble for extra capacity. <\/p>\n
“We planned on running an additional train Saturday night,” said Caltrain spokesman Dan Lieberman. “Turns out we needed more than that.”<\/p>\n
The congestion was compounded by dozens of Waymo vehicles that stopped throughout downtown, creating bottlenecks that worsened the already difficult commute. Wise noted that the city plans to address the disruption caused by the robotaxis.<\/p>\n
“We will be closely working with Waymo to better understand how we can have special events without interruptions from them,” Wise said.<\/p>\n
The mayor\u2019s office stated that public safety remained the top priority and noted that officials had encouraged attendees to take public transit instead of driving. However, as the mass exodus began, riders argued the system was ill-equipped to keep up.<\/p>\n
Across the board, city agencies say they will review staffing, traffic control and transit operations in hopes of preventing a repeat during the next major event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 100,000 people crowded San Francisco\u2019s waterfront Saturday for the Fourth of July fireworks show, but getting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-388698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}