The Martini Commuters

San Francisco's picture-postcard suburb of Sausalito boasts a rare breed of American fauna: a small band of happy commuters. The reason is blue and white, cost $700,000 and floats. It is called the M.V. Golden Gate; and in the eleven months that it has been plying the waters of San Francisco Bay between Sausalito, in Marin County, and the city's Pier One, it has turned hundreds of auto-addicted commuters into confirmed ferry fans.

The trip is inexpensive--500 each way. It is also quick: 30 minutes pier to pier, and the passengers step off virtually into the heart of San Francisco's business district. On board the commuter's lot is little short of idyllic. City-bound riders, too rushed for breakfast at home, can buy mugs of fresh coffee, homemade blueberry muffins and cupcakes at the snack bar on the second deck. For cyclists there are bike racks below. From the sunny afterdeck, commuters can stare at some of the handsomest scenery in the world--the spectacular Golden Gate Bridge, Sausalito's tiny houses clinging like mussels to the surrounding green-brown hills, deserted Alcatraz with wildflowers growing on its rocky sides, and the San Francisco hills covered with white and pastel buildings. In the evenings, passengers see the same splendors in a different light, their perceptions sharpened by tasty 750 martinis, fine Scotch or champagne.

Mail-Order Minister. The agency responsible for making the commuters' ship come in is the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, which launched the luxury ferry service to alleviate rush-hour traffic on the overcrowded bridge. To help attract the 575 commuters who now make the daily round trip aboard the Golden Gate, the district administrators arranged the ferry schedule to get businessmen to their offices on time and ensured dependable performance by ordering maintenance engineers to work every night to keep the craft shipshape. The district also placed two captains on board, one to steer and the other to man the radar set during the Bay's frequent mists and fogs.

Conviviality is the rule aboard the Golden Gate. Several semipermanent cocktail groups have formed, each with its own quasi-reserved section of deck space. Crew members have been known to introduce lonesome secretaries to shy brokers, and Captain Chuck Riechert, who went to the extreme of obtaining a mail-order certificate as a minister, last February conducted the on-board wedding of a devoted Golden Gate couple.

Cushion of Air. One successful ferry will hardly make a dent in the traffic jams caused by the 100,000 autos that now use the Golden Gate Bridge daily, 31,000 at rush hours alone. By 1980, the rush-hour figure should be 47,000. Thus imaginative district officials are now planning to siphon off more bridge commuters with four ferries that are larger (750 passengers) and more luxurious (two bars). Later this summer they will also begin trial runs with a giant 60-passenger air-cushion vehicle, which will skim across the Bay in just 15 minutes. But District General Manager Dale Luehring doubts that it will be universally accepted by Marin County commuters. "A lot of people don't want to get back and forth faster," he observes. "They say a half-hour is just enough time for two martinis."

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