Take Me Out to the Ballgame!

The rains have stopped, spring is here and with it the hoards of clueless baseball fans making the BART - MUNI transfer at Embarcadero Station to get to Pac Bell SBC AT&T Park when the San Francisco Giants are at home.  Not that I'm complaining.  Whenever public transit operators can lure hundreds of people from their cars to attend a sporting event it's a good thing. 

It's not entirely the fault of the Giants fans that they are clueless, since there are few visual cues in the station to direct passengers from the BART fare gates to the MUNI fare gates. Part of the problem is the design; the BART escalators and stairs in the Embarcadero Station face away from the MUNI entrance, so passengers who are transfering onto MUNI need to make an immediate U-turn at the top of the escalators or stairs. Regular commuters know this, but there is little signage to direct the occasional transit riders, so they stand around looking for the MUNI entrance that is behind them.  What signage does exist is very ad hoc; it always looks like someone dashed it off on a color printer at the last minute. 

MUNI has responded to this situation by posting ticket sellers around the BART fare gates who sell passes for the short light rail trip from the Embarcadero Station to the ball park.  They loudly hawk passes to the arriving baseball fans and direct them to the MUNI entrance where someone takes the passes and admits them through the emergency gate, thus bypassing the fare gates. Once the fans go down the escalators to the platform, guides herd them to where they wait for the MUNI Metro train.

It's not so bad on the weekend or at midday during the week but when the Giants play on a weeknight, arriving baseball fans intersect with departing rush-hour commuters and it can get kinda hairy. The fans come to a dead standstill looking around for where to go, while hurrying commuters try to get past them.  Fans don't know the "stand right, walk left" convention commuters use to speed up boarding on the escalators, so it takes more time to get to the platform level, increasing everyone's level of frustration. 

It doesn't have to be this way.  One very low cost solution would be for MUNI, BART and the Giants organization to create visual cues to guide baseball fans from one transit system to another.  Banners hung from the ceiling and baseball-themed stickers affixed to the floors could direct the fans.  MUNI could print baseball-themed ticket-books in advance for the whole season, with a round-trip ticket for each home game with the date and team that the Giants are playing and sell them at the ball park.  Advertise the ticket books on the PA system and the Jumbotron and sell them at the BART stations in the East Bay and on the Peninsula where the fans enter the BART system. (BART should be able to tell MUNI where fares arriving at Embarcadero Station on game days are coming from). 

When AT&T Park first opened, all those involved congratulated themselves on how "transit-friendly" the new ballpark was and to a certain extent they are right; but the devil is in the details, and there are definately some details at Embarcadero Station that need to be worked out.

Comments

[Jamion]

There are a few changes coming that should help, at least once ball fans are down to the Muni platform level...

Muni has already ordered new signs for the trains and the destinations "CalTrain Depot" and "Mission Bay" will be replaced with "Ballpark/Caltrain" which will get rid of the need for those horrible color copied signs stuck to the walls with packing tape reading "take any mission bay train for the ballpark" and the recorded announcement will change as well. Imagine, a voice announcing "Inbound trains, two-car, Ballpark and Caltrain, in, three minutes"

The new signs will also be color coded to the Metro Map, so the N-Judah, which is shown in blue on the map, will have the "N" in a blue circle on train to match.

[Patrick]

Hey Jamison, thanks for the update! Where did you get the inside skinny on what Muni is doing?

I've always thought the rainbow colors on the Muni signage distinguishing the different streetcar lines were all wrong. The J is orange and the N is blue/purple. The N should be orange (like the Giants colors) because it goes to ATT Park.

[Jamison]

I joined the Muni History Yahoo! Group a while back, which a lot of former and current Muni employees are in. Often the discussion is very geeky and technical, but sometimes something interesting like that gets posted.

As for changing the line colors, the N will be cut back to Embarcadero when the new Third Street lines opens.

The service plan is for the J to run to Caltrain at peak hours only, with the N being cut back to Embarcadero. Full time service to Visitacion Valley on the new "T-Third Street" line will actually be an extension of the K.

Now this is where any usability improvements from color coding lines and better destination signs is going to get completely ruined:

Leaving Balboa Park inbound, the K will change it's designation from K-Ingleside to T-Third Street when it arrives at West Portal. From there it travels inbound to Embarcadero (I don't know what the destination signs will read though), where without changing direction, it will go from being an inbound T to an outbound T (towards Visitacion Valley).

Coming the other way, T-Third Street trains will travel inbound to Embarcadero, where it will change back to an outbound K-Ingleside train.

The T will be color coded red to match the K, so at least that will help. One of the most confusing things will be along the southern Embarcadero where an inbound J will be going the same direction as an outbound T and vice versa.

Just wait until game day when Giants fans are told to take either an inbound J or an outbound T to get to the game.