NYC Looks to Expand Ferry Service To Its Far-Flung Ports

The skyscrapers of Manhattan look almost close enough to touch from parts of the waterfront of Brooklyn’s industrial Red Hook neighborhood.

But a distance of mere miles can take an hour or more in travel time for residents in the remote area, who have limited access to bus routes and no subway stations in the immediate vicinity. A plan from Mayor Bill de Blasio would give them, and New Yorkers in some other waterfront neighborhoods, another option — ferry service.

De Blasio hopes ferries will open up some of those far-flung locales and make them more attractive as a place to live, easing a housing crunch in a city expected to reach a population of 9 million by 2040.

“For years, the conventional wisdom has been that certain neighborhoods are doomed to isolation because of their geography,” de Blasio said in his State of the City address last Wednesday. “With ferry service, we are going to change that.”

Under the mayor’s plan, the city would spend an initial $55 million for a ferry system that would start with three routes in 2017 and add two more in 2018. Getting from a ferry dock in Lower Manhattan to up-and-coming Red Hook across New York Harbor, for example, would take just 20 minutes.

The city has said it would set aside $10 million to $20 million for subsidies to keep a ferry ride fare at the same price as a subway ride, $2.50, and has estimated more than 4 million people a year would take advantage. More rides than that are taken on the subway every single weekday.

The plan is for the first three routes to originate from the Astoria, Rockaways and South Brooklyn sections of the city in 2017. The next year, additional routes would start for Soundview in the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. The five new routes would join the ferry routes already in existence, the Staten Island Ferry route and the East River Ferry route. The city also is looking ahead to a potential Coney Island–Staten Island route.

This article appeared in print on page 20 of the February 11th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.