San Francisco May Expand Ferry Fleet

There are lots of people who want San Francisco Bay to look more like it used to--teeming with ferries that shuttled passengers back and forth before bridges did the job.

On Wednesday, a back-to-the-future plan will be launched, envisioning ferries crisscrossing the bay again to ease gridlock left in the wake of the earlier fleet’s demise.

A task force appointed by the state Senate in 1997 to study and make recommendations for water transit on San Francisco Bay will issue the first part of its report in what amounts to a wish list.

“How to do it and pay for it is another matter,” said Russ Hancock of the Bay Area Council, which joined the Bay Area Economic Forum to produce the document. Those matters are expected to be dealt with when the final report is issued, probably in April, he said.

The plan calls for at least 26 terminals served by 70 vessels at an initial cost of $680 million.

“The ferries will have to link up with other public transit systems,” Hancock said.

For a reminder of how things were in the 1920s and ‘30s, one needs only look at the hundred-year-old Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street. City streetcars once circled in front of the building as passengers disembarked from the nation’s largest ferry fleet.

As many as 50 million passengers and 7 million motor vehicles rode the ferries during the 1920s and ‘30s. Today, there are fewer than 3 million passenger trips per year.

Southern Pacific operated the largest system in 1930. The SP fleet consisted of 27 automobile-carrying ferries on seven routes. In all, 47 ferryboats sailed the bay in that year.

Although the big traditional ferryboat disappeared from bay routes in 1958, it’s still possible to board one. The 300-foot Eureka is open to the public at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. Built in 1890, the vessel remained in service until 1957.

New ferries wouldn’t look like the Eureka. They would be more like the M.V. Del Norte, a high-speed ferry capable of carrying 325 passengers on the Larkspur-San Francisco run. The 135-foot boat is the fifth ferry in the Golden Gate Transit District’s flotilla.

Other ferry routes include Alameda-San Francisco, Oakland-San Francisco and Vallejo-San Francisco.

Redwood City on the San Francisco Peninsula is typical of the towns that would like to join that list.

Redwood City Port Commissioner Dick Dodge said a survey of 10 of the largest employers with close access to the port in his city found that 1,111 workers live within three miles of the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Another 762 live within less than four miles. In addition, 291 live within a five-mile radius of Jack London Square in Oakland.

There can be little doubt there are people willing to be passengers.

Ferry ridership swelled during the 1997 Bay Area Rapid Transit strike, the task force noted. After the rail walkout was well over, the ferries reported a 20% gain over pre-strike levels.