Ferry-Tale Ending to Commutes

Five o’clock on a sticky summer Friday. As usual, the main link between Boston and all points south, the Southeast Expressway--a.k.a. the Distressway--was going nowhere. Locked solid.

Headed home in the midst of the soap opera known as Rush Hour, John Buckley, a partner at Coopers & Lybrand, was reading the Atlantic Monthly. His friend Jim O’Hare, a brokerage executive here, was relaxing in his deck chair, grabbing some late-afternoon rays. Behind them, two young men were solving the problems of the universe, bottled beer in hand. Nearby, a trio of young women stopped talking about the stock market long enough to start hashing about their boyfriends. While the sea air ruffled his hair, a bearded man in the lotus position was either meditating or had fallen sound asleep.

Wait a minute: This is a commute?

“No,” said Buckley. “This is heaven.”

Increasingly, that opinion is shared by Bay State commuters who are giving new meaning to the term “one if by sea.” Earlier this month, the fifth major commuter ferry line opened in Boston, linking the city to its suburbs in an ever-widening net. Joined by an additional half-dozen smaller services, the Boston harbor passenger ferries carry nearly 60,000 passengers per week--more than quadruple the figure of five years ago.

Boston’s aquatic commuters--who boast that they arrive at their destinations happy and relaxed, regardless of weather and oblivious to traffic--are part of a burgeoning national family of 225,000 ferry aficionados each day. Passenger ferry service is booming between New York and New Jersey. Along with the well-established Marin County ferry, a new route connects San Francisco and Vallejo, 70 minutes to the north. In Seattle, a new high-speed ferry to and from Bremerton is so popular that transit officials have taken to issuing boarding passes. The faster vessel, Washington state ferry officials said, helped push ridership from 10,400 to 38,400 in a month.

Passenger ferries are under discussion in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. Proposals are on the board to increase service on Long Island Sound. Authorities in Massachusetts are closely watching the Boston-Salem route, which debuted July 1, in hopes of expanding the water routes still more.

Much of the impetus comes from $38 million in potential federal subsidies. But commuters also have flocked to ferries to escape miserable trips on crowded highways. In the Boston area, terrible traffic happened to intersect with terrific new marine technology--some of it developed for use in the Persian Gulf War.

“We were running out of capacity on our highways and bridges, and people started looking out and saying, ‘What else is there?’ ” said Boston transportation planner Martha Reardon, an officer of the International Marine Transit Assn. “In place after place, they looked out and they saw water.”

High-Speed Catamaran Heads to Airport

The new Salem route joins thriving passenger ferry service between Boston and the South Shore suburbs of Hingham and Hull. In Quincy, midway between Boston and Hingham, a high-speed catamaran service backed by General Dynamics carries passengers to Logan International Airport in just 22 minutes, with a stop in Boston five minutes later. A ferry brings residents of Charlestown to downtown Boston, and the water shuttle from Boston’s Rowes Wharf is one of the most popular ways to get to Logan airport. Prices range between $4 and $10 each way, and parking is usually free.

Small passenger boats have been part of the marine scenery here since 1631, when revenues from a ferry across the Charles River helped support Harvard College. Ferries flourished until well into the beginning of this century, but the dominance of automobile travel made them seem obsolete in recent decades.

In Boston, engineering advances made ferry travel smoother and more reliable at just the moment that the mammoth regional highway reconstruction plan known as the Big Dig made gridlock a full-time preoccupation. Abrupt detours through crowded city neighborhoods often doubled the driving time between Boston and its coastal suburbs. The ferry began to look better and better.

“Every so often I go back to my car, just to see if it’s as bad as I remember it,” said O’Hare. “It is”--about an hour of crawling on concrete to cover 20 miles--”so I go right back to the boat”: 34 minutes, even in the worst winter weather. With the advent of the higher-speed vehicles, O’Hare’s ride will be sliced to nearly 20 minutes.

Transportation specialists are less surprised that commuters here have embraced ferry travel than that they waited so long to do so. Two-thirds of the world is covered by water, transit planner Reardon noted, and, around the world, ferries regularly carry more people than airplanes. In Istanbul, Turkey, for example, significantly more passengers ride ferries each year than in the entire United States.

But transportation planners say that growth in ferry ridership with the addition of high-speed service in the Seattle area demonstrates the demand for expanded water transit. Ferry service between Larkspur in Marin County and San Francisco that began in 1976 attracts a core of about 1 million passengers per year, “nothing to set anything on fire,” said Gene Rexrode, district secretary of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, “but strong and loyal nonetheless.”

Painfully crowded bridges and highways in the Bay Area have prompted transportation planners to look anew at the waterways. “Every opportunity to make a landing now with a ferry is being looked at by numerous communities that never looked at it before,” Rexrode said. City officials are backing ferries to bring spectators from the downtown waterfront to the proposed Giants baseball stadium near China Basin. A ferry between the city and San Francisco International Airport also is under discussion.

Ferry Lines Link N.Y., N.J.

The rise of ferry commuting is well illustrated in New York City, where 50,000 passengers cram onto the Staten Island ferry to ride to Manhattan each day. “In 1986, there were zero ferries” between New York and New Jersey, said George Cancro of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “Now there are 15 lines carrying close to 25,000 passengers daily.”

Compared with the total number of workers descending on Gotham each day, that figure is far from impressive, Cancro conceded. But trans-Hudson ferries now carry 6% or 7% of the total number of New Jersey-New York commuters, Cancro said, which is twice as much as Amtrak and over half as much as New Jersey transit buses.

Increasingly, the boats are traveling faster. Lee Bishop is president of Water Transportation Alternatives, the General Dynamics subdivision that manages the Harbor Express high-speed catamaran between Quincy, Logan Airport and Boston. The speedier craft evolved from engineering developed for the military during the Persian Gulf War, Bishop said.

Since they hit the harbor in January 1997, his catamarans have seen steady increases in passenger loads, up to 6,000 passengers each week--more than 1,000 more riders per week this year than last. But the service has yet to recoup General Dynamics’ initial $5-million investment.

Even the highly stable new ferries can’t overcome certain natural obstacles. Protected harbors, such as Boston’s, are more welcoming to ferry travel than open ports. Passengers balk at rough rides on open waters, and at least one Boston ferry route had to be abandoned because the channel it traveled on was too treacherous.

Another obstacle to ferry fever is cultural bias. “Traditionally, we’ve been a culture where we’ve got to be in control,” Bishop said. “We’ve got to have that wheel in our hand.”

He recalled a friend, a much-traveled doughnut company executive who refused to believe that he could save time or energy by driving to the ferry parking lot, riding the ferry to the dock at the airport, then taking a shuttle bus to his airline terminal. Bishop persuaded his friend to try the ferry once. “That was it,” he said. “He never drove to the airport again.”

After years of surveying ferry passengers, Reardon said that reaction is not uncommon. “It’s almost like a religious conversion,” she said: “The big YES!”

Real estate agents echo this enthusiasm. In an area that was once synonymous with the phrase “commute problem,” the ferry “has become our biggest drawing card,” said Martha Amaral Gentry, a real estate agent in Hingham.

While ferry service between Boston and its southern suburbs limped along for years after starting in 1986, shipbuilder George Duclos of Somerset, Mass., said: “The momentum now is taking your breath away. We’re doubling the size of our company. As ferry builders, we’ve been waiting 45 years for this moment, and now we’re finally being recognized.”

Improved Facilities Attract Passengers

Better engines, better seating and better lighting have helped lure passengers away from their cars, Duclos said. Bathrooms are clean and ship-to-shore telephones generally operate well. Large tables provide work surfaces for laptops. There are bagels and coffee in the morning, cocktails and canapes in the evening. One Friday afternoon ferry is known unofficially as the chowder run because it serves steaming bowls of Boston clam chowder.

Former financial analyst Suzanne Stein Filbey found yet another payoff to leaving her car behind. The ferry turned out to be a wonderful place to meet men, she discovered: “I had all my dates on the boat.” She and her husband, Geoff, an engineer, met while ferry commuting. After they were married and looking for a house in which to raise their son, they chose a Colonial era cottage in the village of Cohasset, 10 minutes from the ferry.

*

Times researcher David Turim in Seattle contributed to this story.