Hacker News Reader

Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

Odd, I don't live in Northern California but I was just wondering last week why these companies (sad the public sector doesn't handle it) don't use ferries instead of buses. Ferries are effectively used in other large cities, NYC, Sydney, Seattle, to name a few.

View on HN

There are actually lots of ferries in SFBA, just not on silly routes like SF to RWC. They're funded using the justification of "water emergency transportation" (i.e. post earthquake or something else which takes out a bridge), but basically are just to keep wealthy and prominent voters in a few places happy. Essentially they're heavily subsidized (true operating costs are around $50-150/ride; price is about $8; ridership levels are very low on many routes).

http://sanfranciscobayferry.com/

In Seattle it makes sense because it's between islands, some of which have no bridge access. In the Bay Area, there are bridges directly on many routes, and aside from a couple of tourist places, everywhere the ferries run is at worst two bridges or two segments of ground travel away. (In Seattle, the transit authority is actually fairly competent too, by comparison)

Actually the biggest commuter ferry routes in the Seattle area can be drove round. Ie Kingston and Bremerton are on a Peninsula and Bainbridge Island is connected via the (short) agate pass bridge.

The idea of more bridges has been brought up but met with strong "not in my backyard" resistance. A short bridge from Bremerton to Bainbridge would make a lot of sense (and allow two ferry routes to be combined) but the wealthy Bainbridge Islanders are against being connected to the less well off Bremerton.

Ah, that makes sense.

I looked at Whidbey Island before (and visited; it's nice!), but didn't realize you could actually drive there (even if it's super out of the way).

Your numbers struck me as surprisingly high. It seems hard to believe that running a ferry across the bay with 100 passengers can cost $10,000. But there are definitely articles backing you up:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/South-San-...

While basically matching your numbers for the new routes, the article also mentions that the effective subsidy for the older routes is about $15 per ride. I guess part of the question is how to distinguish "start up costs" from "operating costs".

> Your numbers struck me as surprisingly high. It seems hard to believe that running a ferry across the bay with 100 passengers can cost $10,000.

I still found it hard to believe. So I took sfgate's numbers, and did the math.

100,000 riders a year? That's only ~270 riders per day. For an assumption of 8AM to 10PM, it isn't a hundred passengers going across the bay in per hour – it's a grand total of 19.

And for that, they built a $26M ferry terminal?

No wonder it costs so much.

They only commute to and from work, with a total of 280 seats (two 140 seat ferries), figure two trips south, and two trips north, so 4 trips a day, a carrying capacity of 560 commuters, getting 279 would be a utilization of about 50% (that seems a bit optimistic)

I looked at this a lot because my GF works in Brisbane, CA and we live in Oakland. It takes 1.5h to commute by land public transit (and is crowded); going via ferry takes a similar amount of time (but, no flexibility on time), but SSF to anywhere is hard. There's a shuttle for Genentech at the ferry, but going the 2 miles from the ferry to Brisbane is kind of a pain still. The easiest thing is actually still to drive through SF traffic across the bridge in the morning, even as a non-HOV, which is a pretty clear failure of transit (most of the fault is Brisbane, which is just a horrible place in general).

BART and then Uber from 16th st or something seems like the only semi-viable non-self-drive option. Pretty expensive, though.

Nice article, it says basically that a 140 seat Ferry is $8M. The compares to about $300K for 60 seat bus, or at most $900K for equivalent seats. I could not track down a solid dataset for operating cost per mile for a large vessel. I know that in general it is quite high because it takes much more energy to push through the water than it does to roll on freeways (and even less to roll on rails). Further there are weather systems that would keep a boat at the dock but a bus or train could drive through. Of all the transportation modes trains are the most economical to operate on a marginal cost basis but have the high startup and operating costs from the essentially dedicated infratstructure.

It would be interesting to see if they could build a floating train somehow (trust me, this is the kind of project that gets you promoted at Google :-) basically float a monorail track between up and down the bay such that you got the energy/operating costs benefits of rail setup without the huge land/tax/easement costs of a land locked rail line.

If you're willing to shut the train down during 100 year storms, I wonder if you could just build a regular monorail along the bayfront. It's not very deep; there's a bunch of marsh/slough crap on the coast. Other than a few areas, the bay view is pretty ugly already. An electric elevated monorail should have minimal environmental impact (just pylons; not sure how much during construction).

Transfers.

Unless your endpoints are directly at quayside, a ferry boat service is going to involve at least one, and quite possibly two transfer points at either terminal.

Commuter buses, by contrast, are particularly efficient as they allow passengers to be collected close to their homes, often within feet, or at most a few blocks (in a dense urban setting, as is the case with the San Francisco executive shuttles). Where there's a reasonably direct land route between locations (note that this isn't the case for, say, a Bainbridge Island - Seattle commute, buses are often faster than ferries.

Fuel cost is another factor -- on a per-passenger basis, boats use a considerable amount of fuel, I believe bus service is generally more efficient (low vehicle:passenger weight ratio).

On the positive side: boats generally don't suffer from congestion issues (though weather and fog may slow them down), and often afford more space per passenger with a greater ability to work en route, as well as the option to get out in the fresh air (though a brisk 20-50 kt breeze is rather more bracing than you might be prepared for -- the after-decks are generally quite pleasant though).

As for public-sector ferry services, there are numerous ferry services on the San Francisco Bay, many resurrected following the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake which took out a major bridge crossing (the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge), including service between San Francisco and Sausalito, Tiburon, Larkspur, Vallejo, Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda. I've heard rumors of a public Redwood City service but don't believe it's been restarted. Oddly, there seems to be no good one-stop shopping site for information on ferry transit, including http://511.org which is otherwise a transit / traffic information hub. Wikipedia seems to have one of the better compendia, though I'm not sure it's complete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferries_of_San_Francisco_Bay#F...

I commute from the Jersey shore to NYC daily by ferry, and while it is often the most relaxing part of my day (stormy days being the exception) and more convenient than the alternatives available to me, I don't believe rapid transit by water is inexpensive or environmentally friendly.

We have ferries, but the problem is that they tend to go to places that are already serviced by BART, which is much more convenient (if less enjoyable), or dock from places that arent near BART (Alameda).

As I understand it, the Ferry from Sausalito to SF is regularly used, because BART doesn't visit the north. Why there is no South Bay to East or SF I'm not sure, maybe because up until recently there wasn't enough interregional traffic where BART/Caltrain was not already there.

Unlike NYC, SF Bay environment protection advocates are pretty powerful. They don't want the bay shores to be built up and developed.

See Bay Keepers: http://baykeeper.org/blog/take-action-help-stop-unwise-devel...

If you've ever hiked up the trails at Lands End in SF and looked out at the Pacific towards Marin, you'll see an excellent example of what about this area makes even the most apathetic person a conservationist.

Geography. The north bay has a long history of ferries. This is because there is lots of development close to the water. The north bay is also an outlet for the Sacramento River so the water is deep and some of the surrounding land quite picturesque. The south bay is a huge network of sloughs that have been turned in to major industrial salt production historically, though this is waning. Beyond salt, there has been very little water side development up in till recently. Most of the places you would want to go in the south bay are at least a mile from the water. A ferry to Facebook actually works as they took over the old Sun campus which is one of the rare tech centers that jut out in to the bay. There are a few, but nothing compared to inland...

And yet the ferry doesn't go to Menlo Park. It ends in RWC.

On a pure transportation-time basis, ferries are nearly useless in the SFBA, because they take longer than just running a bus would.

That really depends on the route and traffic. So long as your endpoints are close to terminals, they can be faster (and much more reliable) than ground transport. There's very, very, very rarely a major traffic tie-up on the water.

The worst case might be an accident at one of the terminals or a specific boat being disabled.

I did see a proposal for a hovercraft that was pretty effective, it got around the "how do I get on it" issue by having it come inland a bit in the south bay. But you are essentially correct that from a time of commute standpoint ferries almost always lose if any other powered transportation is available.

One big problem is that the SF bay is shallow and there's a lot of silt built up in the areas where startups would want stops.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com