PGA Presidents Cup - Needs Improvements in Public Relations

The 2009 Presidents Cup golf tournament at San Francisco's Harding Park has just came to an end... oh, and some more fun news... THE PGA TOUR IS COMING BACK IN OCTOBER 2010 (Schwab Cup) AND 2011 (Champion's tour). I'm cursing out loud right now.

But out of this huge event there's a few details that our city officials and the Presidents Cup organizers didn't do or tell the public about.

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One in particular is the information provided by the PGA Tour about the free shuttle service. The Presidents Cup website released two different maps with different information.

The first map was posted on their website before the tournament started and mentioned that the end of Muni's N-Judah line was to provide free shuttle service to the event, but the second map that was posted no more than one week before the tournament shows the shuttle service from the N-Judah terminal does not exist. Why did this happen?

You may also notice that the Westlake parking lot is not mentioned on the second map, but sure is on the first one. But I know that the lot was used for the event.

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There were also areas designated as parking areas for the event, but was not mentioned on the event's website:

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the City and County of San Francisco owns the Ocean Beach parking lot (although, U.S. Government police shoos cars away in the late evening), and has failed, once again, to notify the public that part of the lot is to be used for the exclusive use of the PGA Presidents Cup for nearly a week. Great idea... piss-off the surfers.

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As for road closures, I don't see it amusing when after the event is over each day, the city does not remove any of the signage telling people that an upcoming road is closed. One in particular is going northbound on Skyline and there's this big electronic arrow telling people to merge left, but it's 8PM and Skyline is completely open and can be driven through between Great Highway and Sloat.

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Here's a strange parking problem... street parking was banned on Lake Merced between Winston and Font, but I didn't see any shuttle buses or anything else taking advantage of those parking spaces. So why ban parking within that area?

Since it was not utilized, SF State students and the rest of the public should have been given the privilege to park there.

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Did the PGA and the city take my advice in 2005 to notify the people of San Francisco State University by advertising in the Golden Gate [X]Press newspaper? The answer is no.

The campus population reads the weekly newspaper, so a few thousand bucks to advertise and tell the 36,000+ student, staff, and faculty population about this major event would have helped ease some of the frustration.

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Lastly, SFMTA/Muni did not post sufficient information about the re-routes for the 18-46th Avenue bus line in a timely manner. They posted the information online on Monday, ONE DAY BEFORE THE EVENT STARTED.

To make things even worse, 311 did not have any information available until Sunday (two days before the event started on that Tuesday) and the information about the re-routes and skipped stops are only known as "Muni Notice #09-268" in which would be difficult to get in writing, unless if you got it via a Sunshine Request.