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And the ferries are heavily subsidized and very expensive to operate, and they pollute quite heavily.

They don't compare remotely favorably to the subway along any axis except start-up cost (it's cheaper to buy a boat and build some piers than to build a subway tunnel).

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except start-up cost

Which is, well, hugely significant when you think about it.

Cities should have a planning timeframe for infrastructure improvements with a horizon longer than a couple years.

Well, yeah. And they should probably be having discussions based on something beside snarky retorts and popcorn-throwing too, I guess.

But I guess those discussions will need to happen elsewhere.

Even if you could afford to run enough ferries to make a dent, which you can’t, they simply don’t have the bandwidth.

Some people tried to make the math work for the L shutdown and even if you had a line of ferries just following each other as close as safely possible it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Subways are incredibly efficient at moving large numbers of people.

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