Comment by joshrotenberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshrotenberg | Hacker News Reader

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I ride (and complain about) BART regularly to/from SF from the Berkeley/El Cerrito area. The truth is that it's still pretty reliable, though having lived where I am now since 2004 the decline in reliability and increase in crowding clearly isn't going to stop.

One alternative is AC Transit's transbay service, which I swore by for many years. Unfortunately the increase in road traffic has that option declining as well.

There has been talk in the past about a Berkeley Marina/Albany Bulb ferry, but to my knowledge there are no current plans. I haven't ridden the ferry many times from other places, but I'd like to think that having that as an option would get a decent amount of ridership as well as possibly reduce the load on the roads and tracks.

The lack of any ferry service connecting the East Bay between Jack London Square in Oakland and Vallejo is pretty surprising. Judging from the fact that a morning commute-time BART train starting in Richmond is typically standing room only by El Cerrito Plaza (third stop on the line), I'd say the demand for alternatives is definitely there, so there must be financial/political/engineering reasons that there are no ferries from other parts of the East Bay.

Boats are fundamentally slow and cannot dock at the center of a city where most jobs are, but it's edges. Docking and boarding/unboarding is a minimum 5-10 minute process too. A really fast ferry goes at 30 knots, which is around 35 miles per hour. Often ferries are there because building the equivalent bridge or train doesn't meet the cost/benefit ratio, otherwise they are an inferior transportation option.

The reason why there probably isn't any service from jack london square is because it's faster to get to a bart station by bike or similar and then take the BART.

As for vallejo, there looks like there is a ferry service for some reason according to google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B005'59.8%22N+122%C2...

Sorry, to clarify I was saying that the only ferry service that does exist is from Jack London Square and then north of that all the way up in Vallejo. The entire, pretty well populated chunk of the East Bay between those two points basically has BART from Richmond, AC Transit Transbay, or their cars as an option into SF and below. That was sufficient for a while, but is less so more and more.

"Boats are fundamentally slow and cannot dock at the center of a city where most jobs are, but it's edges."

The ferry terminal in San Francisco, on the embarcadaro, is about as central as central gets ...

Yes, there is a Vallejo ferry which goes right to the center (see just above) of San Francisco.

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