Public Comment

I share Steve Geller’s vision of prioritized bus rapid transit that moves faster than the cars on our major arterials. But the extent to which this will replace personal vehicles is an open issue, and I believe Steve is applying more wishful thinking than science when he asserts that “people will flock to ride it instead of drive.” 

From a purely utilitarian point of view, transportation subsidy dollars are far more effectively spent on busses than on ferries. However, Steve’s critique of the Berkeley ferry is based on some common misconceptions which need to be corrected. 

1) The Berkeley-San Francisco ferry service will not require a huge parking lot. We are only talking 149-passenger capacity times three or four commute-hour departures. There are 2,200 existing parking spaces at the Marina, mostly empty on weekdays. Nearly 1,000 spaces will be within a short walk of the ferry terminal at either of the two candidate sites. Weekday ferry parking will be efficient shared use of this resource. 

2) Yes, every car trip from the ferry terminal involves a cold start. Compare to the cold start from a parking garage in the City, followed by an hour of stop-and-go across the bridge. The ferry will not have the capacity to make a serious dent in congestion or air quality, but the marginal effect is clearly positive by turning long car trips into short ones. The important point here is that the ferry will not be a viable alternative to busses or BART - it will be an alternative to driving across the bridge in heavy traffic. It will attract riders who would not otherwise take public transit at all. 

3) There will be expanded bus service directly to the ferry terminal. This is an important part of the Water Transit Authority’s proposal. 

If I may confuse the issue with some facts, here are the actual efficiency numbers for various modes of transportation in terms of energy per passenger-mile: 

Single-occupancy car: 

7,000 BTU per passenger-mile (assuming 20 MPG) 

3,500 at 40 MPG 

1,167 at 40 MPG in carpool lane with three passengers 

AC Transit Bus: 

660 BTU/passenger-mile with 56 passengers 

1,320 at 50 percent passenger load 

New low-emissions 149-passenger ferry 

2,400 BTU/pax-mile, full passenger load 

4,800 at 50 percent passenger load 

Light Rail 

91 BTU/pax-mile, full passenger load 

182 at 50 percent passenger load. 

BART 

68 BTU/pax-mile, full passenger load 

136 at 50 percent passenger load 

The inconvenient truth here is that a modern high-mileage car with three passengers is delivering about the same fuel efficiency as a bus. BART is the hands-down winner, with light rail close behind. The small ferry uses about twice as much energy per passenger-mile as a bus, but is still much cleaner than a typical car with only one occupant. 

So why pour subsidy into ferries? Answer: Because people like ferries. The 2005 survey found that Berkeley residents favor establishing a new ferry service by an eight-to-one margin. It’s a quality of life thing, not a practical solution to traffic or air quality when we already have a bridge and a tunnel. We agree that we can’t justify a per-trip subsidy that’s any higher than the subsidy for BART or busses, so the ticket price should reflect actual costs. 

The actual cost to operate the service will probably be around $8.50 per one-way trip. This is what the privately operated Tiburon and Sausalito ferries now charge. If we keep the fare close to that level, the scale of service will remain appropriately small and stay within the capacity of the existing marina infrastructure. 

Elitist? Not compared to driving a single-occupancy vehicle across the bridge during peak congestion hours and parking it downtown for the day. Still, we need to avoid the public-policy trap of over-subsidizing those who can easily afford full fair. And we should also offer deep discounts to those arriving by bike or bus (similar in concept to the free crossing of the Bay Bridge offered to carpools). 

Actually, a passenger-only ferry service is a bus advocate’s dream: It forces people to use the bus for at least one end of their trip, even if they never would have considered taking the bus without the ferry ride as part of the deal. 

Paul Kamen is a naval architect who serves on the Berkeley Waterfront Commission