Better ferry service could ease traffic woes
Just imagine if Bay Area traffic flowed like water. Smooth, speedy and effortless. Except, you don’t have to imagine. Ferries exist today but carry only a minuscule percentage of the region’s commuters. Limited service and connections make ferries a largely inconvenient alternative for many commuters. It’s time for the Bay Area to launch a new era of expanded ferry service.
A growing population, a sizzling economy, and no money or space for new highways and bridges have produced a perfect storm of congestion on our bridges, roads and highways. Even vaunted landbased mass- transit systems, such as BART and Caltrain, are overwhelmed and struggling to keep up with even basic maintenance. It doesn’t have to be this way. At their peak service in the mid- 1930s, a fleet of 50 ferries shuttled an estimated 50 million to 60 million passengers across the bay each year.
Restoring even a fraction of that service would be a game changer in battling Bay Area congestion. The Bay Area Council was instrumental in creating the Water Emergency Transportation Authority ( WETA) for exactly that purpose. We need to leverage the agency’s authority to reinvigorate and expand bay ferry service and make it relevant to and convenient for today’s commuters and employers. There’s good reason — beyond the grind of highway congestion — why now is the time to act.
Big construction projects — building the new Bay Bridge, connecting a second transbay BART tube and adding freeway lanes — usually take decades to complete and cost billions of dollars. Expanding ferry service could be done relatively inexpensively and quickly.
Demand for ferries is enjoying steady growth. Ridership on WETA ferries rose from 1.4 million in 2012 to more than 1.9 million in 2014, an almost 36 percent increase. The Golden Gate Transit system, with service between Marin County and San Francisco, provided 2.47 million passenger trips in 2014, the highest number since 1974. Privately run water taxis offer another opportunity to grow ridership across the bay.
With traffic becoming a serious drag on business productivity, employers are more motivated than ever to get their workers off congested roads. Exploding job growth in San Francisco, the Peninsula and Silicon Valley offers a tremendous opportunity to create new north- south ferry service. Both Google and Facebook have even operated demonstration ferries between San Francisco and Redwood City. Incredible advancements in ferry technology also mean faster, cleaner boats.
A good place to start is updating WETA’s 2003 regional ferry plan to reflect current realities and new opportunities provided by the Bay Area’s robust economic and population growth. There also needs to be stronger coordination between WETA and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission — the region’s primary transportation funding agency — on how to bring any plans to life. With support from the business community and other key stakeholders, we might just succeed in putting traffic in our wake.