China Basin Heliport in San Francisco's Mission Bay neighborhood is a long-closed helipad, not an active car-rental location, so anyone searching for a pickup near this address needs a different plan entirely. The site once served short helicopter hops along the waterfront near Oracle Park, but it has not operated as a functioning aviation facility in years, and no rental company maintains a desk anywhere close to it. The practical answer for car rental in San Francisco is to look instead at the city's real hubs: San Francisco International Airport (SFO), about twenty minutes south of downtown depending on traffic, and Oakland International Airport (OAK), roughly a similar distance across the bay, both of which host large consolidated rental centers with international and local desks under one roof.
Inside San Francisco itself, several neighborhoods near Union Square, SoMa and the Financial District keep smaller rental counters for travelers who would rather skip the airport shuttle and start driving directly from downtown, though selection and vehicle availability tend to be narrower than at SFO or OAK. Whichever pickup point you choose, driving in San Francisco itself means steep hills, dense one-way grids and famously tight parking, so a smaller vehicle is easier to manage than anything oversized, at least until you clear the city and reach the wider Bay Area freeways beyond it.
Once outside the city, routes fan out cleanly: north across the Golden Gate Bridge toward Marin and the wine country, east across the Bay Bridge toward Berkeley and the Central Valley, and south along the peninsula toward Silicon Valley and beyond. Traffic on 101 and 80 can back up heavily during commute hours, so building extra time into any airport transfer or day trip is worth doing, and this remains true regardless of which of the Bay Area's two major airports serves as your actual arrival point for the trip, since neither China Basin nor any nearby heliport factors into that planning at all.