City Wants to Start Park Shuttle Service

By Alastair Bland

From 2001 to 2005, a free weekend passenger shuttle in Golden Gate Park navigated a seven-mile circuit between the concourse museum region at the park's east end and the west end near the beach. Then, in 2003, the Academy of Sciences closed for renovation and park attendance dropped dramatically, causing the city of San Francisco to terminate the shuttle service in the fall of 2005.

But this fall, the museum is scheduled to reopen and the city's Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority has contracted a private transportation consulting company to tackle the logistics of re-implementing a public shuttle service to connect the park's small nucleus of museums to the heart of downtown.

Over the next four months, the consulting company will conduct a feasibility study to identify possible funding sources, potential operating agencies, such as Muni or other shuttle service companies, secure low-emissions vehicles and consider several route options.

"The old shuttle was an intra-park shuttle," said a spokeswoman for the transportation consulting agency. "Once people walked or drove or rode their bicycles to the park, the shuttle could take them down to the Beach Chalet and back to the museums.We want the new shuttle to bring people to the park from the rest of the City."

Various routes have been proposed, and each includes a run through either Fisherman's Wharf, downtown or North Beach before making an express run to Golden Gate Park.

According to Ron Miguel, president of the Concourse Authority, the Academy of Sciences attracts approximately 2.5 times more visitors than the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum and a convenient public transportation system will greatly alleviate the anticipated influx in car and pedestrian traffic in the park when the museum reopens in September.

City records report that the former intra-park shuttle served 28,000 riders in 2002. The following year, with the reopening of the de Young Museum after a four-year closure, 55,000 riders utilized the free service. In 2004, after the November 2003 closure of the Academy of Sciences, just 29,000 people used the shuttle. The number dropped to 24,000 the next year.

After the shuttle service was discontinued in 2005, the disabled community felt the loss, and in the summer of 2007 the city's Recreation and Park Department implemented two 16-seat shuttle buses, outfitted for wheelchair accommodation, that makes circuits through the small portion of Golden Gate Park closed to traffic on Saturdays and Sundays.