Nice article, it says basically that a 140 seat Ferry is $8M. The compares to about $300K for 60 seat bus, or at most $900K for equivalent seats. I could not track down a solid dataset for operating cost per mile for a large vessel. I know that in general it is quite high because it takes much more energy to push through the water than it does to roll on freeways (and even less to roll on rails). Further there are weather systems that would keep a boat at the dock but a bus or train could drive through. Of all the transportation modes trains are the most economical to operate on a marginal cost basis but have the high startup and operating costs from the essentially dedicated infratstructure.

It would be interesting to see if they could build a floating train somehow (trust me, this is the kind of project that gets you promoted at Google :-) basically float a monorail track between up and down the bay such that you got the energy/operating costs benefits of rail setup without the huge land/tax/easement costs of a land locked rail line.

If you're willing to shut the train down during 100 year storms, I wonder if you could just build a regular monorail along the bayfront. It's not very deep; there's a bunch of marsh/slough crap on the coast. Other than a few areas, the bay view is pretty ugly already. An electric elevated monorail should have minimal environmental impact (just pylons; not sure how much during construction).

> Your numbers struck me as surprisingly high. It seems hard to believe that running a ferry across the bay with 100 passengers can cost $10,000.

I still found it hard to believe. So I took sfgate's numbers, and did the math.

100,000 riders a year? That's only ~270 riders per day. For an assumption of 8AM to 10PM, it isn't a hundred passengers going across the bay in per hour – it's a grand total of 19.

And for that, they built a $26M ferry terminal?

No wonder it costs so much.

They only commute to and from work, with a total of 280 seats (two 140 seat ferries), figure two trips south, and two trips north, so 4 trips a day, a carrying capacity of 560 commuters, getting 279 would be a utilization of about 50% (that seems a bit optimistic)

I looked at this a lot because my GF works in Brisbane, CA and we live in Oakland. It takes 1.5h to commute by land public transit (and is crowded); going via ferry takes a similar amount of time (but, no flexibility on time), but SSF to anywhere is hard. There's a shuttle for Genentech at the ferry, but going the 2 miles from the ferry to Brisbane is kind of a pain still. The easiest thing is actually still to drive through SF traffic across the bridge in the morning, even as a non-HOV, which is a pretty clear failure of transit (most of the fault is Brisbane, which is just a horrible place in general).

BART and then Uber from 16th st or something seems like the only semi-viable non-self-drive option. Pretty expensive, though.