Vol. I, No. 37 · San Francisco — Monday, September 14, 2026 · Price: same berth, different year
Congrats to femur-shorts-creme on winning the Bi-Rite gift card from the Show and Tell in the Park event! It will be emailed to you today.
BY MAXINE DOLAN, CITY DESK
Ruby Princess is 951 feet long, carries up to 3,080 passengers, and is scheduled to call at San Francisco’s cruise pier more than any other ship in the fleet, two years running. The Port of San Francisco’s published schedule lists 89 cruise-ship calls at the city’s cruise terminals this year. Thirty-three of them, 37 percent, are Ruby Princess. The season isn’t over, and a published schedule is a plan, not a completed voyage.
San Francisco’s cruise calendar looks like a rotating cast. Twenty-five different ships are scheduled to call this year, sailing under lines from Princess to Norwegian to Holland America to Virgin. The traffic itself is narrower. Just two ships, Ruby Princess and Carnival’s Luminosa, account for 55 of the 89 calls. That is 62 percent of the whole season, more than the other 23 vessels combined. Next year’s published schedule runs the same pattern almost exactly: 31 of 89 calls, 35 percent, again Ruby Princess.
Every call Ruby Princess makes, this year and next, is what the port calls a “full turn.” The ship arrives, drops its passengers, loads a new set, and leaves the same day. Thirty-one of her 33 calls this year berth at Pier 27, the other two at Pier 35 South. Either way, Pier 27 is less a stop on her route than a home port, the place most of her cruises start and end. In winter she runs turnarounds to Ensenada and Cabo San Lucas. In summer she shifts north, sailing out of San Francisco to Ketchikan and Prince Rupert, with a handful of longer voyages reaching Hawaii. Twenty-two of Luminosa’s calls follow the same full-turn pattern, on a similar rotating Mexican Riviera and Pacific Northwest schedule.
Zoom out from the ship to the cruise line, and the concentration only deepens. Eight different vessels sail under the Princess Cruises flag into San Francisco this year: Ruby, Royal, Emerald, Island, Grand, Coral, Discovery and Star Princess. Together they account for 45 of the 89 calls, just over half the season. Next year the share holds again, 44 of 89.
Confidence is high on the counts. Both schedules are the port’s own published berth assignments, re-summed live tonight against the file’s own totals. The caveat is that a berth schedule is a plan, not a completed voyage. A handful of calls, especially late in each year, could still shift or cancel before departure. Nothing in the file explains why Princess Cruises leans on San Francisco this heavily rather than larger West Coast cruise ports like Los Angeles or San Diego. That answer would need Princess’s own scheduling logic, which the port’s schedule does not carry.
Barring changes, Ruby Princess will pull up to Pier 27 again next year, thirty-one more times, and the passengers changing over each time will be forgiven for thinking they have found San Francisco’s cruise ship.
Charter Amendment Proposals in San Francisco Fell 63% After 2010
The Board of Supervisors introduced 264 measures to rewrite the city’s own constitution between 1999 and 2018. The pace has cooled from about 17 proposals a year to about 6.
BY EMMETT GRADY, ARCHIVES DESK
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors introduced 210 proposals to amend the Charter, the document that functions as the city’s own constitution, between 1999 and 2010, an average of about 17 a year. From 2011 through 2018 it introduced 52, an average of about 6.5 a year, 63 percent below the earlier rate. On the Board’s own record, rewriting the city’s constitution stopped being routine business somewhere around 2010.
The single busiest year was 2001, when the Board introduced 34 separate proposals, close to one every ten days. The quietest was 2013, with two. The Charter is the document that defines how San Francisco’s government itself works: which offices exist, how they’re elected, what they’re allowed to do. It is also relatively young. Voters replaced the prior 1932 Charter wholesale on November 7, 1995, effective July 1, 1996. The window tracked here begins just three years into that freshly rewritten document, not partway through an old and settled one.
Not every proposal even reaches a vote of the people. Every measure in the file passes through at least one of three recorded bodies: the Rules Committee, the Clerk of the Board, or the full Board of Supervisors, which the record lists as the acting body on 135 of the 264. The Clerk’s own system marks each measure’s final status, in its own words, not this desk’s. 114 of the 264, 43 percent, are marked “Passed.” Fifty-one are marked “Killed.” Seventy-three are marked “Filed.” Twenty-two are marked “Failed,” two “Withdrawn,” two are still open. The file does not define those terms. This desk reads “Passed” as the status for a measure that succeeded at the Board. It cannot independently confirm that “Filed” means the opposite — only that the record uses a different word for it.
Confidence is high on the counts themselves: this desk queried the Clerk’s live database tonight and its totals matched exactly. The archive itself is frozen. The Clerk’s public database stops recording new matters after December 2018. The one measure logged in 2019 is still shown as pending, not evidence the Board stopped proposing changes.
San Francisco’s constitution used to be rewritten more than thirty times some years. Lately it is closer to six.
ON THE CALENDAR
Foundry Live Demo Night. A live-demo showcase for Bay Area startups building on agentic-AI tools, hosted at GitHub’s South Beach office by Arte Merritt and Minsoo Lee. Registration stood at 322 as of 9:14 a.m. today, up from 33 when the desk first logged the listing on August 27, with 58 spots left before it caps out. It ranks second of three AI-industry gatherings the desk is tracking this week, behind a 648-signup agent-tools mixer and ahead of a 281-signup MCP meetup.
Tuesday, September 15, 5:00 PM · South Beach (GitHub, 88 Colin P. Kelly Jr. St.) · free · lu.ma/tbj6dk8b
From the desk’s calendar: public Luma pages, counts as of 9:14 a.m. September 14. Tell the desk about the gathering it missed.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. Ruby Princess ship specifications, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Princess, retrieved live September 14, 2026: built by Fincantieri (Monfalcone, Italy), ordered 2007, launched February 1, 2008, entered service November 2008; IMO 9378462; Crown-class; gross tonnage 113,561 GT; length 951 ft (290 m); capacity 3,080 passengers, 1,100 crew; operator Princess Cruises; owner Carnival Corporation & plc; port of registry Hamilton, Bermuda. 2. Port of San Francisco, 2026 Cruise Terminal Schedule (updated July 21, 2026), sfport.com/maritime/cruise, queried live September 14, 2026: 89 numbered vessel calls at Pier 27/Pier 35 South. Ruby Princess 33 calls (37.1%; 31 at Pier 27, 2 at Pier 35 South), all listed “Full Turn”; Carnival’s Luminosa 22 calls (24.7%), all “Full Turn”; distinct vessels 25; Princess Cruises-flagged vessels (Ruby, Royal, Emerald, Island, Grand, Coral, Discovery, Star) 45 calls (50.6%). 3. Port of San Francisco, 2027 Cruise Terminal Schedule (updated August 13, 2026), sfport.com/maritime/cruise, queried live September 14, 2026: 89 numbered vessel calls. Ruby Princess 31 calls (34.8%), all “Full Turn”; distinct vessels 28; Princess Cruises-flagged vessels 44 calls (49.4%). Full PDFs parsed with pdftotext -layout; raw text and query URLs in receipts.json.
2. San Francisco Board of Supervisors legislative record, webapi.legistar.com/v1/sfgov/matters (OData, keyless), filtered to MatterTypeName eq ‘Charter Amendment’, queried live September 14, 2026: 264 matters. By introduction year: 1998 1, 1999 11, 2000 5, 2001 34, 2002 12, 2003 33, 2004 15, 2005 15, 2006 8, 2007 24, 2008 20, 2009 17, 2010 16, 2011 8, 2012 4, 2013 2, 2014 8, 2015 4, 2016 16, 2017 7, 2018 3, 2019 1 (archive frozen at the end of 2018; see desk/tips.jsonl, 2026-08-04). 1999–2010 sum 210, average 17.5/year; 2011–2018 sum 52, average 6.5/year; decline 62.9%. By status: Passed 114 (43.2%), Filed 73 (27.7%), Killed 51 (19.3%), Failed 22 (8.3%), Withdrawn 2, Unfinished Business 1, Pending Committee Action 1. By recorded acting body: Board of Supervisors 135, Rules Committee 63, Clerk of the Board 63, Rules and Audits Committee 2, Parks and Recreation Committee 1. Raw JSON and full query URL in receipts.json. 2. City and County of San Francisco, Office of the City Attorney, “A Brief History of Elections Administration in San Francisco” (memorandum), sfcityattorney.org, retrieved live September 14, 2026: “On November 7, 1995, the voters adopted a new charter… [effective] July 1, 1996,” replacing the Charter ratified March 26, 1931 and effective January 8, 1932.
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