Picture this: You’re on your way to work, but you’ve escaped the underground. You’ve left the slow bus behind. Instead, you get the ocean wind in your face; you ride the waves and ditch your straphanger past.
This is the vacation-worthy vision that Captain — uh, Mayor — Bill de Blasio described on Wednesday, announcing more particulars about his almost-citywide ferry plan launching at an unspecified date “this summer” (a Staten Island route is in planning stages).
What we do know: Each ferry will carry 150 passengers. There will be routes to Manhattan from Rockaway and Bay Ridge, and Soundview in 2018. The cost will equal a MetroCard swipe ($2.75). There will be booze.
Enjoy the tantalizing prospect of ferry transit for a moment. And now welcome back to the real world of New York City, where ferry routes have failed before, and no matter how this attempt goes it won’t entirely solve NYC’s burgeoning transit problems.
Making the water work for New York
“The key word when it comes to ferry service is niche,” says Jeff Zupan, senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association.
About 10 years ago, Zupan studied ferry routes in the New York City area since 1986, when interest revived. Of some 70 services that had been tried, roughly 20 were still operating. It’s a different city now, perhaps more open to ferry transit, but some of the old lessons positive and negative may hold true.
The routes that work can be “delightful,” Zupan says, as well as downright helpful in certain circumstances.
Going from Staten Island to Manhattan, for example, there’s not a great ground mass transit option. Hence the iconic Staten Island Ferry.
Short, direct trips can be popular and inexpensive to operate. Longer, multi-stop routes — like the 48-minute, four-stop ride from Bay Ridge to Wall Street in de Blasio’s plan — might be challenging. That trip could be even shorter by train.
Ferries are helpful when they get you right where you want to go, Zupan says: to Lower Manhattan, for example, where there are clusters of jobs. This explains the number of de Blasio’s routes ending on Wall Street.
But ferries are less helpful when you need to take a second form of mass transit after returning to dry land. Routes that end somewhere like East 34th Street, for example, necessitate hopping on a bus for many.
That means using their MetroCards. Currently, de Blasio’s city-run ferry plan would not work with the state-run MTA — meaning no free transfers onto buses or trains.
The lack of integration between the MTA and de Blasio’s ferry plan is due to de Blasio not, as he likes to remind New Yorkers, being in charge of the transit agency. The MTA is responsible for the subway’s close to 2 billion rides annually, rides that have been marred by increasing delays and packed trains.
To deal with transit complaints, de Blasio has tried a number of alternative, non-MTA initiatives to add to the city’s transit options. The ferries are one such attempt. The beleaguered Brooklyn Queens Connector streetcar is another.
Whatever good they do for whatever cost, these city-led attempts at transit are dwarfed by the goliath subway system we love and hate.
De Blasio projects 4.6 million annual trips on the new ferries, on par with the ridership of a single bus line — the Q43 had 4.5 million rides in 2015 and ranked 43rd in 2015 ridership — paling next to a lone leading subway station like Times Square (66.4 million).
We’re a long way away from making commutes easier
There are limited MTA-city partnerships that can be immediately helpful. More select bus service, which de Blasio and the MTA have worked on, greatly improves speed and experience. Such routes also increase transit access for underserved areas, often low-income neighborhoods far from the hip or potentially-hip locations that might get a streetcar or a boat.
Another potential partnership that would help low-income New Yorkers’ travel experience? A subsidized MetroCard for those living at or below the poverty line, many of whom have seen their earnings stay the same even as MetroCard cost skyrocketed in recent years.
That could cost an estimated $200 million a year. The mayor has already allotted nearly $250 million to get the ferries going for the next six years. In the city’s $85 billion budget, maybe similar money could be found to subsidize the card that most New Yorkers can’t live without?
“This is a world of choices,” de Blasio said on the subject Wednesday, focusing on the tantalizing, dreamy boats rather than the same-old same-old underground.
Unfortunately, when it comes to transit, New Yorkers want — and need — it all.
