New transportation: Ferry terminal opens in Alameda
‘You won’t find a more enjoyable and scenic commute in the Bay Area’
ALAMEDA >> The latest effort to get commuters out of their cars officially was launched Thursday when a new ferry terminal opened in Alameda, sending people to and from San Francisco.
It’s the latest upgrade in a series of expansions planned by the Water Emergency Transportation Authority, also known as the San Francisco Bay Ferry, which runs routes to San Francisco from Richmond, Vallejo, Oakland, Alameda and South San Francisco.
The last time the authority opened a terminal was in January 2019, in Richmond.
About 200 residents, politicians and transportation officials showed up for a 10:30 a.m. ribbon-cutting event at the new $23 million terminal, located at the former Alameda Naval Air Station.
But they missed the boat by four hours, when the first vessel left the terminal at 6:30 a.m. for the city across the bay.
“There were some hardy souls out there on the ferry,” Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft told the crowd about that inaugural voyage shortly after sunrise.
The terminal’s exact location is called Seaplane Lagoon Ferry because it’s the spot where the Navy’s amphibious aircraft used to emerge from the bay and taxi onto land.
“You won’t find a more enjoyable and scenic commute in the Bay Area,” Ashcraft said.
The trip from the terminal to San Francisco’s waterfront takes about 20 minutes.
It’s the Island’s third ferry terminal. Unlike the others, which neighbors complain don’t provide enough parking to keep cars off their streets, the new terminal offers plenty of parking spaces — 400 in the city-run lot across the street.
Alameda Point Partners, the team that’s developing the former military base into housing, retail and office space, contributed about $10 million for the terminal project. Measure BB, a half-cent sales tax that Alameda County voters passed in 2000 for transportation projects, kicked in $2 million, and the rest was financed from federal pandemic relief funds.
Oakland resident Ellie Cook, 28, was bicycling when she saw the gathering and decided to stop to find out what was going on.
“I am a big supporter of the environment and fighting climate change,” Cook said. “If this helps that, then I support it.”
With the ferry terminal in mind, AC Transit plans to launch another bus route in August. Line 78 will run from the Fruitvale BART station to the former Navy base, now called Alameda Point, cutting through the Park Street and Webster street business districts and timed to accommodate ferry arrivals and departures, said Elsa Ortiz, president of AC Transit’s board of directors.
“It’s not only Alameda that’s going to benefit from this,” said San Leandro Mayor Pauline Russo
Cutter, who also serves as chair of the Alameda County Transportation Commission. “But the whole community regionally.”
Although the terminal was mostly finished last August, its opening was postponed because people stopped riding during the pandemic.
Ferry trips dropped 99% from 118,000 passengers on the Alameda/Oakland to San Francisco route in April 2019 to barely more than 1,000 in April 2020, according to a report from the Alameda County Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
The Harbor Bay line service, which carried 32,000 passengers in April 2019, was suspended during the height of the pandemic.
In March, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission awarded the ferry service $13.4 million from the federal Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021, which helped pay for the terminal in addition to replacing revenue lost during the pandemic.