Mayor Bill de Blasio heralded the NYC Ferry service as a “new era” for the city.
With increasingly congested streets and subways becoming a norm for New Yorkers, the mayor has pinpointed ferries and the city’s relatively underutilized waterways as a solution.
In Queens on Sunday, April 30, he held a boat christening and unofficially opened the service, which commenced from the peninsula, with stops in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, at 5:30 a.m. the next morning.
“Tomorrow, a new era begins in New York City. Tomorrow morning we go back to the water,” the mayor said at the Rockaway dock near Beach 108th Street and Beach Channel Drive.
“We need to keep coming back to it because … we’re having more and more trouble getting around the city,” the mayor added.
After the Rockaway route begins service, two more — Astoria and South Brooklyn — will launch this summer. By the end of 2018, another three routes will come online.
Queens Borough President Melinda Katz said the ferry service will be a “huge boost” for the area.
“When you have permanency in a ferry, it means predictability for the Rockaways,” she said. “It means that stores can predict the number of folks coming in and out. It means that we can create jobs based on the predictability of a permanent ferry. It means that families who move out to the Rockaways know that they are going to be able to get in and out and work with the ferry every single day for years to come.”
The city is spending $325 million to launch the service on top of an additional operating cost of $30 million per year. Hornblower is operating the service, overseen by the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Twenty boats in all — each with a 150-person capacity — will be bustling through New York Harbor by 2018.
The ferries will sport whimsical names like Lunchbox, McShiny and Friendship Express, which were picked by city second-graders living near the ferry docks.
Single fares will be $2.75 — the price of a MetroCard — though the ferry’s payment system will not be integrated with the MTA’s. That means riders won’t be able to use a MetroCard to board an NYC Ferry or take advantage of a free transfer onto a subway or bus.
Critics believe this could limit ferry ridership to more well-off commuters, and to those who live and work within walking distance to the docks, not to mention beachgoers making day trips to Rockaway.
David Jones, the president and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York and the mayor’s own appointee to the MTA’s board, has chastised de Blasio for prioritizing the transit project over an initiative that would fund city-subsidized MetroCards for low-income New Yorkers.
“I’m very supportive of expanding the infrastructure in New York, but suddenly enormous attention is placed on everything but equity in transit,” Jones said at a news conference last week. “Everything becomes: We have a new water taxi service, we have a new light rail — unsubsidized for poor people.”
The mayor has dismissed the charge, reasoning that affordability and availability of mass transit are two different issues. He’s predicting 4.6 million annual riders of NYC Ferry.
“If this works as well as we hope — if people ride this and believe in this — we can go farther and we can get more and more people off the roads,” he said, “and give more and more people a better way to get around and just end a lot of the congestion we face.”
