Terminal is designed to accommodate vessels
The $100 million modern cruise ship terminal is designed to accommodate vessels carrying between 2,600 and 4,000 passengers, which means more passengers will arrive in San Francisco via cruise ships then ever before, according to the Port of San Francisco.
Among those who endorsed the development of a new cruise terminal in the city was Princess Cruises’ vice president of shore operations, Bruce Krumrine.
In a letter to the Port of San Francisco in 2010, Krumrine said that among other advantages, the Port would gain the ability to handle larger ships and a greater number of passengers, translating to more business for Princess Cruises.
According to Cruise Line International Association, the cruise industry’s official trade organization, the cruise ship industry has grown about 7 percent each year since 1980.
With the industry’s growth, however, ships have also gotten larger, acting more like cities than boats and developing issues, such as crime, that are no stranger to cities.
As the ships grow larger and the cruise destinations expand to far-reaching corners of the globe, passengers’ rights as well as environmental protections have not yet caught up, critics say.
In one year spanning 2007 to 2008, 421 incidents of crime were reported by the cruise ship industry to the FBI. Of those crimes, 154 were sex-related, according to the testimony of Dr. Ross Klein, a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland who testified at a U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on the oversight of the cruise industry in 2012.