The long lost San Francisco Bay ferry system
There should be more ferries.
I was on my roof just now watching a Red and White ferry pull in or drive around Pier 39 off San Francisco’s urban coastline. In the distance was the East Bay. You could see Berkeley, Richmond and if you turned your head the Bay Bridge that leads to Oakland. San Francisco is awesome. It got me thinking there should be more ferries though.
Today the primary way people move between San Francisco and the East Bay is by driving, the BART tube, Uber or Lyft — maybe soon self driving cars, a market Google owned Waymo is poised to conquer.
You can take ferries from Alameda, Richmond and Oakland into San Francisco. Hell you could even take a catamaran ferry from Vallejo which is pretty fast and puts up a big wake.
Routes to and from the East Bay are run by San Francisco Bay Area Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA). Which is a very rude name; it implies any time anyone would take a ferry was in an emergency 😂
There are separate, privately owned ferries that will take you to Sausalito, Larkspur, Tiburon, Richmond. All told, the ferries around the Bay, pre pandemic moved 16,000 people on a typical weekday1.
Back in 1913 though 60,000 people rode the ferries on a typical weekday!2 San Francisco’s ferry building makes way more sense. Instead of stepping out onto a busy street there would be a rotunda with cable cars to take you down Market Street. Thank God the freeway overpass that used to go by the ferry building is gone. That was before my time.
Bottom line:
4X more people took ferries to work in San Francisco 100 years ago than today.
Now, times have changed. With the pandemic less people than ever are going into tech offices at all. There are all sorts of stories about San Francisco empty office buildings. For some reason though, renting an office in San Francisco is still f*cking expensive though. Maybe it’s a horrible time to expand ferry transportation systems.
After all, a few things they did not have in 1913 really help the whole “moving people around” situation. They’re called Bridges and there are some good ones. The two going into San Francisco are the Golden Gate Bridge3 completed in 1937 and the Bay Bridge, completed in 1936. The bridges were funded by bond measures during the Great Depression. Maybe people hated the ferries idk.
Either way, I don’t know what it would take to have four times the ferries going around the Bay. It would be cool though to more easily be able to travel around it. It could unlock new urban centers around ferry stations. It might make going into the office more fun and revitalize downtowns. It could relieve housing pressure because people could live in the East Bay and commute to work by ferry with a bar on it instead of through a tube in the ground or sitting in traffic.
Bottom line ferries are cool. Let’s expand on and improve the systems that run them ⛴️
Credit to Gary Kamiya and his book Cool Gray City of Love for teaching me about the history of ferries in San Francisco. The chapter is called “The Front Door”.
The Golden Gate Bridge is red. It is called the “Golden Gate Bridge” because it is a bridge that crosses over the “Golden Gate Straight”, which is the one mile wide strip of water that releases water from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, filling and emptying the Bay twice a day. Sailors, like Sir Francis Drake, sailed by the Golden Gate Straight for a hundred years before the Spanish Mission Dolores was founded in 1776 via land travel.