• The freeway grid is essentially defined and is being completed.
• Plans to improve and expand existing public transportation systems have been developed and are being pursued.
• The Bay, therefore, presents the last, best alternative remaining, the single most promising source of untapped mobility.

• Water transit is the most economically-feasible and environmentally compatible capital investment in transportation that can significantly reduce congestion and improve mobility.
• Water transit has greater flexibility than other components of the transportation system because new routes and destinations can be established more easily by redeploying vessels.
• Water transit has the ability to serve as a primary transportation mode in times of emergency and can assist in disaster recovery, unlike other systems that are more likely to be severely damaged or substantially disrupted.

 Bay Area traffic congestion is increasing at an exponential rate, creating more miles of freeway congestion every year, for more hours of the day. The latest Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) released by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission estimates that traffic delay will increase by 249 percent by 2020, even with an $88 billion expenditure for roadways and transit over the next two decades. The Bay Area cannot build its way out of this problem in the traditional manner. New freeway costs are enormous, may cause unacceptable relocation of people and jobs, and often contribute to environmental degradation. However, while spiraling levels of congestion on the highways and bridges have increased highway travel time, advances in fast ferry technology and vessel speed have decreased water transit trip time. The point has been reached where water transit is actually faster than vehicle travel between several locations during peak demand period, and thus a far more viable option than in past years.Level-of-Service (LOS) on most Bay Area freeways is degrading quickly (LOS is ranked A through F). LOS rank E, which represents stop-and-go conditions, and LOS rank F, which represents gridlock, are the common conditions during peak periods on Bay Area freeways. A trip from Mountain View to Hayward in the afternoon peak period, a distance of about 25 miles, commonly takes about 75 minutes (20 mph). The Regional Transportation Plan estimates that the automobile trip from Union City to Moffett Field will take about 50 minutes by 2020, and that the Palo Alto to San Francisco trip will take about 45 minutes. It also estimates that the San Rafael to San Francisco commute will increase from an average of 41 minutes to 62 minutes by 2020 and that the Oakland to San Francisco trip time will slow from 34 minutes to 51 minutes.In a historical nutshell, as the Bay Area grew, bridges added new commute capacity that exceeded the capacity provided by the old ferry system. BART added another form of transportation, now reaching capacity during peak hours. BART extensions, however, cost millions of dollars per mile, and the BART transbay tube has a fixed upper limit of capacity--no more than 30 trains per hour--only eight more than BART currently operates during the peak hour. Total daily travel along the “Bay Bridge corridorâ€� is about 274,000 vehicles on the bridge, approximately 134,000 BART passengers, 14,000 AC Transit bus passengers, and 4,000 ferry passengers (Vallejo, Alameda/Oakland, Harbor Bay Isle).In the last 10 years, however, the number of vehicles crossing the Bay Bridge has increased by more than 30,000, or about 12 percent. The RTP estimates that daily person-trips will increase by about 30 percent by 2020--well above the ability of planned BART or bus improvements. Even a 10 percent increase in vehicle counts in the next 10 years (less than one percent annually) would generate about 28,000 new trips, severely limiting travel in the corridor, even with improvements planned by BART and AC Transit. Other bridge corridors are also very busy as shown in Attachment F.Bridge traffic is projected to increase between 30 and 40 percent in the next 20 years. Bridges simply don’t have the capacity to handle this projected growth. They are already at, or approaching, full capacity. The Bay Bridge is already carrying 10,800 vehicles per hour in one direction during peak hours. It has no capacity to carry more traffic. The current Caltrans plans to rebuild the East Span of the Bay Bridge include no additional capacity for the Bay Bridge, either vehicular or transit. The other bridges are at 90 percent or more of capacity during peak hours.The current total weekday travel on the Richmond-San Rafael and Bay Bridges ranges between 900,000 and 1.2 million trips daily. Bridge truck counts indicate that more than 37,000 trucks use Bay crossings daily. The potential does exist to divert some of these truck trips related to express mail and light airfreight to water transit, however. By 2020, according to MTC estimates, the total weekday travel in these corridors could range from 1.1 to 1.5 million trips.

 With the Bay such a dominant feature of the regional landscape, it is impossible to minimize its potential as a travel corridor. In recent decades since the construction of the bridges, water transit has begun to figure once again in the regional transportation planning, even if actual levels of investment have not matched the potential. Periodic earthquakes, gasoline crises, or transit strikes have underscored the need for viable, fully-functioning water-based alternatives. For this reason regional decision makers have provided at least a modicum of funding to this mode, and highlighted water transportation as a subject for continued attention. Progress in the current decade traces to 1990 when California voters approved Proposition 116, a $1.99 billion statewide bond issue for rail transit and related projects. The measure earmarked $10 million for ferry service between Vallejo and San Francisco and $20 million for other water service around the state. In order to develop a spending plan for these funds, and to maximize available matching funds, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the City of Vallejo sponsored a 1992 study, the Regional Ferry Plan . The Plan offered a number of short- and long-term recommendations for improving the ferry network. A number of those recommendations have been implemented; others have not. Meanwhile, new information shows major prospective growth in demand for water transportation services. The tourist and excursion markets are expanding, including the construction of new sports stadiums near the waterfront. The conversion of the region's military bases holds the promise of new housing stock and job centers, both of which could be served naturally and easily by water transportation. And, officials at the Oakland and San Francisco airports are investigating service and capacity upgrades by having their facilities accessed from the water side. At the same time, highway gridlock grows worse by the month. In the intervening years since the 1992 Regional Ferry Plan , the State Department of Transportation (Caltrans) reports that roadway congestion in the Bay Area has swollen to more than 100,000 hours lost per day by the commuters in the nine Bay Area counties, a figure that translates into more than $850,000 in daily productivity losses and wasted resources. To be sure, Bay Area planners and transit providers are working diligently to improve the existing transportation infrastructure and relieve congestion. Major rail expansions are under construction or coming on line under the leadership of the major regional systems--BART (to the San Francisco Airport), the San Francisco Municipal Railway (N-Line extension to Mission Bay, the Third Street Corridor Project), the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (Tasman light rail extension), and a new Joint Powers Board bringing commuter express service on refurbished Southern Pacific tracks through the Altamont Pass. Bus operators are maximizing service under budgetary constraints, and working within a welcome new state legislative mandate (Senate Bill 1474) to provide more coordinated, cross-jurisdictional service. Some expansions and additional capacity are being added to the highway system, mostly through a number of county-based self-help taxation measures. These will be matched by a limited number of state-financed, regionally-planned capacity improvements at some of the key regional bottlenecks and choke points. Although these investments are adding capacity to the system, the region’s population is growing and, fortunately, the economy is strong and expanding. The California Department of Finance has released reports showing the state's population doubling by the year 2040, with a significant portion coming to the Bay Area. Within 20 years, the Association of Bay Area Governments estimates 1.4 million new jobs will cluster primarily in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and various East Bay locations. Without a stunning reversal of trends, however, the housing stock will stay relatively fixed in those areas, lagging seriously behind the job growth. The major residential developments will be in Solano, Sonoma, Napa, and Contra Costa counties. And although transit usage will grow in absolute numbers, vehicle ownership will outpace these figures, as will vehicle miles traveled. And despite the best and most concerted efforts of the region's planners and transit providers, there is projected a staggering increase in traffic congestion, a sobering prospect that should jar the region's public officials and civic leaders into action, fashioning an altogether different--and bold--response. Consider the cost of expanding capacity and increasing mobility by conventional means: the BART system costs upwards of $70 million per mile; additional highway capacity runs at least $32 million per mile; the construction of a single freeway interchange can cost more than $300 million, and the Bay Bridge east span seismic replacement will exceed $1 billion. Meanwhile, the Bay is seriously underutilized as a transportation facility, both as a mode and a corridor. An advanced high-speed ferry costs $10 million and a modern efficient terminal up to $15 million. In fact, the initial capitalization of a world-class water transit system in the Bay Area could be no more than the cost of approximately four freeway interchanges or the new Bay Bridge span. In light of present circumstances and future demographic trends, can the region afford not to use one of the world's finest natural harbors and waterways? Fortunately, the vision for a water transit system in the Bay Area is very timely. Public interest in an integrated, comprehensive regional water transit system is running at an all-time high. The 1996 Bay Area Poll reported 82 percent of respondents favored expanded water transportation services; the 1998 Bay Area Poll duplicated this result and revealed that 80 percent of residents favor tax increases for transit expansions and improvements. Further, even without the benefit of this vision or conceptual design, 48 percent surveyed last fall said they would increasing bridge tolls an additional $1 to pay for increased ferry service, a robust result coming so soon after the 1998 $1 toll increase. It appears that Bay Area residents are ready for a world-class water transit system in their region.  

In truth, this has already been done. The Bay Area was once the ferry capital of the United States, with water transportation playing a long and historic role in the development of the region--not to mention a fashionable role in society. Appendix B summarizes a great deal of this history, but the story dates as early as 1850, the year California entered the Union, and the Kangaroo entered service on a route between San Francisco and the Oakland Estuary. By the late 1800s, 22 passenger-carrying cross-bay ferry companies were in operation. Later, an additional five companies carried only automobiles. The ferries served approximately 30 destinations, half of them on the San Francisco-Oakland corridor (see Figure 1). Most ferry lines were established and operated by railroads seeking means to extend their service across the Bay. Consolidation took its toll, however, and by the early 1930s only 10 passenger operators remained. Of these, the Southern Pacific Company was by far the largest operator, with 22 vessels in full-time service in 1935. The Key System and Northwestern Pacific Railroad (NWP), a subsidiary of Southern Pacific, held second and third place. Between them, the three operators carried 49 million passengers annually. The vessels were large and stately. The NWP Eureka had seating for 2,300 and standing room for an additional 1,000 people. All of the Southern Pacific major vessels had seating capacity of greater than 1,000; the Golden Bear could seat 2,200. By modern standards, these ferries were slow, powered by steam until the 1920s when diesel engines made their appearance. But even with diesel engines, the thirty-mile run between Vallejo and San Francisco took nearly two hours, at an average speed of 15 knots. The slower pace brought on-board restaurants into vogue, passengers took advantage of their time in transit to consume a substantial meal, and social historians report that the galley chefs were as well trained in the culinary arts as any of their counterparts on shore. The peak ferry transit years were 1935 and 1936, when as many as 60 million people crossed the Bay annually on a fleet of 50 ferries. As many as 250,000 passengers flowed through San Francisco's Ferry Building each day, loading onto streetcars that left every 20 seconds. All total, the ferries made 340 arrivals and departures daily. Then came the great bridges: first the original Dumbarton Bridge and Carquinez Bridge in 1927, followed by the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. These were followed by the Richmond-San Rafael, Benicia-Martinez, San Mateo, and the new Carquinez, Antioch and Dumbarton bridges. With their completion, decline of water transit was precipitous, and nearly immediate. By 1958 there were no more ferries, period. Moreover, in the case of the Bay Bridge, entrepreneurs thinking to offer ferry service were statutorily prohibited from doing so within a 10-mile span, a provision the State Legislature had enacted to ensure the bonding agents a reliable toll revenue stream. They needn't have worried. By the 1950s it was apparent that congestion would reach a critical stage, and the traveling public would require alternatives to the bridges. But the water-based alternatives would not assert themselves in the minds of the region’s officials. Instead, heavy rail and rapid transit captured the imagination of the region, and the Bay Area's history records a long, interesting chapter on the creation of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART). A portion of the bridge tolls were used to finance the construction of the BART transbay tube as a replacement for the railway tracks removed from the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. Ferries, however, were still prohibited from competing directly with the bridges.

 Mounting congestion, occasional transit shutdowns, and natural disasters provided the justification required for a new generation of water transportation, starting with the Golden Gate Larkspur Ferry Project and the Tiburon Ferries in the 1960s. By 1982 water-based service had reached a turning point. Until then, most observers regarded the Larkspur Project as a noble but failed experiment, over-budget and substantially below the targeted patronage. Then came the 1982 mudslides in Marin, which eliminated automobile access to San Francisco. Suddenly, it seemed-water transportation wasn't merely a quaint, costly redundancy. On one day alone, three 700-passenger Larkspur ferries carried more than 12,200 passengers. Concurrent to these developments came a decision to convert gasoline-powered engines to diesel fuel. Until then, the Golden Gate ferries had been powered by three gasoline turbine engines which proved enormously expensive throughout the gasoline crises of the 1970s and 1980s. While the conversion to diesel lowered speeds, it also lowered costs substantially. When these lower costs were coupled with the favorable new, mudslide-induced disposition for parallel systems, the Larkspur Project found itself on a stable public policy course. The service was not growing to speak of, but it was not contracting either, and local policy decisions were supportive. Meanwhile, congestion on the other, state-owned bridges continued to grow, and there were occasional calls for new water transit links. Events such as the 1978 transbay tube shutdown catalyzed the Berkeley Ferry Committee, for example, to provide new San Francisco service from the Berkeley Marina. When the tube reopened, however, the operation lurched into financial deficits, and vanished. In 1984 the Harbor Bay Isle development in Alameda sponsored a two-year demonstration project that was partially funded by the Urban Mass Transit Administration which documented the feasibility of operating hovercraft throughout the Bay Area. In conjunction with this demonstration project, more than 20,000 signatures were gathered from Bay Area residents in support of ferries. In response, the State Legislature rescinded the statutory restriction on ferry service in the Bay Bridge corridor when the bonds were refinanced following the passage of Regional Measure One in 1988. The October 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake was the crucial path-changing event. The month-long closure of the Bay Bridge pressed ferries into immediate operation, many of the vessels on loan from the Washington State system and elsewhere. Within two weeks, ferries from Alameda, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and Vallejo carried 6,800 passengers in the morning peak period (about the same load that three lanes on the Bay Bridge could sustain, per hour). All-day totals of 20,000 passengers were normal during the rebuilding period. This experience of this event also gave rise to two new ferry services, the Alameda-Oakland Ferry and Harbor Bay Maritime. The 1989 Earthquake did more than establish ferries as a critical link in the region's emergency preparations. Because the capacity of the service and the experience of the riders were both much better than expected, water transportation came to be understood as more than merely a coping strategy in times of duress. When the Bay Bridge re-opened, ferry ridership diminished, to be sure, but it did not evaporate, and Bay Area leaders took their cues from these riders to introduce new measures that would re-establish water transportation as a vital contributor to the overall regional transportation infrastructure. The Legislature enacted post-quake emergency legislation enabling ferry service in the transbay corridor and permanently rescinded earlier ferry prohibitions in the various transbay corridors. In addition, Regional Measure One made all the state-owned toll bridges a uniform $1. And when the California voters approved a statewide bond issue for rail and other transit projects in 1990, $30 million was earmarked for ferry services. As the current decade began, water transit had come back to the fore, and the stage was set for quantum advances in the way the region leveraged this important transportation mode. The timing coincided with technological breakthroughs, especially marrying reliable diesel engines with proven catamaran hull designs, enabling large passenger vessels to achieve higher speeds with lower operating costs. Until the mid-1980s, the fastest passenger boats operated at about 18 knots (20 mile per hour), a pace that competed poorly with the automobile. But the introduction of the high-speed catamaran, powered by conventional diesel engines, brought ferries into the realm of marketability, as well as financial viability. Today, some high-speed catamarans achieve speeds up to 40 knots (in excess of 45 miles per hour). The high-speed vessels from Vallejo and Larkspur presently achieve speeds approaching 35 knots (in excess of 40 miles per hour), substantially increasing their marketability. Accordingly, these have quickly become the preferred, standard vessel technology in the Bay Area. Catamarans servicing Vallejo and Larkspur are so successful that passengers are being left behind on the dock, signaling the beginnings of a new era on the water. Appendix D summarizes the current state of water transit in the Bay Area, detailing service, patronage, and farebox recovery figures on the region's six passenger routes, all of which connect with a terminal or landing in San Francisco. All total, 11,250 passengers board ferries daily in the Bay Area, roughly 3.5 million in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1998. Fiscal year 1999 is expected to reach 3.8 million passengers. The figures show that overall costs (per seat mile) can be lower for ferries than for rail systems, and about the same compared to bus service. And, because additional, new ferry service doesn't require expensive right-of-way acquisitions, the capital requirements are orders-of-magnitude less than rail and highway systems. A comprehensive, high-speed mass water transit system would achieve significantly higher operating economies, and produce a significant new increment of mobility for the Bay Area.  

With rapidly increasing traffic congestion and decreasing mobility, there is an urgent need for bold action to preserve the economic vitality and protect the quality of life in the region. All reasonable common sense and rational analysis leads to a compelling conclusion: The time has come to build in the Bay Area the best high-speed water transit system in the world.