In an earlier blog “Looks like Colma” I noted that there is virtually no ship traffic in the San Francisco Bay. I counted the number of waiting vessels yesterday: four. Ten years ago there were 20-25 ships waiting to unload and load.
Both San Francisco and Oakland have done their parts to destroy the commerce, hundreds of thousands of jobs and vitality that shipping generates. 
This recent article shows why the political and incompetent Port Commission in San Francisco has done its part to destroy shipping. New plans for dock facilities on top of new plans that never got executed. Note all the bullshit PR statements in this article. The underlying truth is that S.F. won't keep up with market demands because S.F. is anti-commerce.
Willie Brown was asked why Chicago is able to get things done and San Francisco isn‘t. His reply: ‘Chicago is goal oriented, San Francisco is about process.’ Translated that means that San Franciscans only want to fight, they have no interest in the real world or genuine human vitality. Although fighting can be fun.
As for Oakland, only the recent visible incompetence of New Orleans shows that Oakland is not the most politically inept city in America.
Seven years ago when the Navy was giving the Alameda airbase to Oakland, I asked Jerry Brown, the mayor and an acquaintance, whether he could get a new 1,000-foot-long bridge built so that Alameda could become the center of airline freight traffic for DHL, Fedex and UPS. Alameda is an island connected by a tunnel which could never handle the truck traffic for an major air cargo center. Jerry said “No.”
Just “no” for a half million jobs lost.