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New York just announced a new ferry line between Staten Island and Midtown, adding to the growing NYC ferry transportation system. It’s definitely a secondary transportation system compared to the train-based systems, but it has been growing in size and popularity in recent years. The island layout of NYC obviously helps a lot.
And that got me thinking about ferry services and other water-based transportation systems and the fact that they don’t seem to be common at all in North America. It’s a really fun and enjoyable way to get around, and you don’t have to deal with traffic jams the way you do in a bus or car on the streets.
Honestly, I’m not aware of any other water-based local public transit systems in The US or North America at all… thinking of cities with lots of water, I’m thinking that Miami, Seattle, San Francisco, and Vancouver have layouts that would be great. Do they have systems in place like this? Or anywhere else in North America? This information is surprisingly not very easy to find on Google, making me believe that they’re not very common in this part of the world, unfortunately.
This thread is mainly asking about local everyday public transit systems within one city or neighboring cities that function as the same metro (ex: NYC/Jersey City, SF/Oakland, Seattle/Bellevue, etc.), but longer-distance ferry services are welcome here as well. These can be ferry systems, water taxis, canal networks, or any local transportation system that uses waterways.
ALSO: which cities can benefit from a water-based public transportation system that lack them?
Honestly, I’m not aware of any other water-based local public transit systems in The US or North America at all…
Washington state did have the largest ferry system in the country mainly centered around metro Seattle, with 25 million passengers a year prior to Covid. It has the second largest vehicular ferry system in the world. Public buses in Seattle drive onto these ferries.
Car ferry leaving downtown Seattle to Bainbridge (own photo)
Edit: I take my comment about NYC ferry back. Forgot about Staten Island and its free ferry line, that’s like 60k people a day. NYC has also really increased its passenger volume in recent years.
Washington state has the largest ferry system in the country mainly centered around metro Seattle, with 25 million passengers a year prior to Covid. It has the second largest vehicular ferry system in the world. NYC ferry system is small potatoes compared to Seattle.
The only other cities outside of NYC I can think of are SF, Chicago & Baltimore’s river/harbor taxi’s but are 100% restricted to the cities core and are exclusively pedestrian.
Seattle would unchallenged here. Like Guineas said, Seattle has the largest very system on the planet.
The only other cities I can think of are Chicago & Baltimore’s River/harbor taxi’s but they are by and large restricted to the cities core, not the great metro.
Boston has quite a few ferries. Between the NPS and MBTA ~4.5 million people use the ferry every year. Plus another 4 million on the Steamship Authority to the Islands (Private seasonal passenger ferries not included)
Seattle/WA excels because of loads of Islands who only have ferry connections to the mainland so few places can compete.
Very serious. Something like ~65k use it daily (most of it centered around metro Seattle)
How does that make NYC "small potatoes"? The Staten Island Ferry does that all by itself. And then you have NYC Ferry, NY Waterway, and NY Water Taxi. Total it's over 100,000 per day.
In the LA region, Long Beach operates a water taxi that is used by literally hundreds of people per day. But it's a real part of the transit system and you can use your TAP card.
NYC does huge numbers of people. Seattle's superlatives are more about trips, routes, etc. I think about 5,000 walk off ferries at the Downtown terminal at morning rush hour, less than NYC.
Washington State Ferries (WSF?!) is the main system. Kitsap Transit and Metro Transit also run ferries.
PS, it's all accessible by roads too, aside from the San Juan Islands (any others?). But driving around takes a long time.
We're also the biggest cruise ship port on the West Coast. And we have a private company that does Victoria fast ferries.
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