by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

OAKLAND–UCSF Hospital at Mission Bay is on board with the new Warriors arena to the relief of the world championship team. UCSF and it’s medical staff were opposed to the new arena because of traffic issues during event nights and the question on how emergency vehicles and patients would be able to access the hospital. UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood said that the hospital was satisfied with the City’s presentation of how traffic lanes would be separated for Warriors and UCSF traffic on game nights involving separate traffic lanes. The W’s really need to put all their ducks in a row to get this going.

Although the latest poll of San Francisco voters show that they favor a new arena at Mission Bay there is still opposition to the new arena and the lead on that comes from Mission Bay Alliance that says despite what the city is proposing on the drawing board to get traffic divided and organized that there will be traffic snarls on game, event nights, and Giants game nights and there will be no way to get away from that.

San Francisco is probably one of the toughest cities in the country to build anything of substance including a multi purpose sports arena very close to the waterfront neighborhood located at Mission Bay. This process to get the arena through is a day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year project. Now you take a town like downtown Denver, there is basically no traffic, there is very little congestion to get to the either Sports Authority, Coors, or the Pepsi Center.

For the City it’s going to eventually be a congested situation with two major league events going at the same time in the critical months of April, May, and June when the Warriors and Giants are overlapping. This will be close to Market Street and the traffic over there will be horrendous and there will be bicycles and you got everything going over there. You got public transit and a lot of cars and if the Warriors move to the City it’s going to be so bad for the traffic.

San Francisco is on it’s way to becoming one of those towns where half of the town is closed to traffic and in this case the South of Market. The voters always look at the taxes and how much more their going to pay, not to mention rent and mortgage in the city is through the roof now. Building an arena right now looks like it’s on track for Golden State but that could all change when the Mission Bay Alliance starts showing how traffic will look like and the proposed tearing down of highway 280 going to the Embarcadero and what that is going to look like.

The Giants were able to pull off their stadium back in 2000 because most of the money to build was from private funds, the Warriors new arena will be done with private funds too, but the traffic hang up is something the Alliance is pushing with City voters. When you build an arena in a metropolitan area and it’s not a social event, there’s tax increases and people don’t like to pay more taxes and in California we have enough taxes.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice for the A’s, the Spanish TV voice for the Angels, and does News and Commentary each week at http://www.sportsradioservice.com