An alternative route for commuters, leisure riders
Suzette Bather, a two-year resident of Yonkers, sat at the City Pier on a sunny morning last week and, looking out at the Hudson River, waited for her yellow taxi. It would ferry her to her financial associate”™s job at JP Morgan Chase in lower Manhattan.
She greeted Mark Solomon, an Ardsley resident and trial lawyer for a Manhattan Financial District insurance company, who took a seat beside her on the bench. Bather and Solomon were among the first commuters to ride the New York Water Taxi”™s 149-passenger catamaran when the Brooklyn company a year ago launched service from Haverstraw and Yonkers to the World Financial Center and Wall Street. Though Jamaican-born Bather avoids the river run in winter, when, as Solomon said, “it gets extremely cold out there,” both are ardent converts to the pleasures of commuting by ferry.
Yonkers city officials, private developers and business owners with stakes in the future of the city”™s downtown and waterfront hope reduced ride fares that the ferry operator began May 1 will lead other commuters to discover what Bather and Solomon have on the river. Then too, they are the young professionals that stakeholders here want to attract as residents and consumers on the redeveloped waterfront.
Bather was referred to Yonkers while a graduate student in Westchester County at Pace University. “I”™m like, ”˜What”™s Yonkers?”™ she recalled. “I always thought of Yonkers as a dungeon or something. I came to visit and I loved it.”
An apartment tenant in the city”™s Greystone neighborhood, she would like to move to the downtown waterfront. “I”™m ready,” she said. “I”™m looking to buy something. I think this place, things are on the up and up.” But in a scarce housing market downtown, “I haven”™t seen anything to buy,” she said.
Bather did find “a little community of people” who began riding the ferry to and from Manhattan a year ago. “It was so much fun,” she said. “It was as though you weren”™t even going to work. It was like a bunch of people on a cruise in suits. ”¦It was a pleasure to get out of work at 5 o”™clock and meet up with your buddies on the boat.”
“I think it”™s a great thing they”™ve done,” she said of the ferry service, which the private New York Water Taxi operates with a federal grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. through a two-year contract administered by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “It”™s a way for them to utilize another resource to move people from one place to the next. In addition you get to mingle with nature.”
Solomon, a year-round ferry rider, described mingling from the boat”™s top deck with an osprey that swooped down and speared a fish from the Hudson with its talons. “You can”™t get that on the Metro-North,” he said. “It can”™t be beat. They make the experience more like you”™re on a cruise rather than sitting in a big metal tube going through a dirty tunnel and pretending not to notice there are other people sitting next to you.”
Bather initially balked at the price of her riparian commute. “It”™s steep,” she said. “At first when you buy that 40-ride, $400 on your credit card, it”™s like, did I really want to do that?”
That financial consideration might account for first-year ridership numbers on the Hudson River line, which operates four ferry runs daily during the business week. September was the best month for the service, with an average weekly ridership of 118, while the lowest weekly ridership was 83 in December, according to a Port Authority spokesman.
Travis Noyes, New York Water taxi vice president for sales and marketing, said there has been “a significant jump” in commuter numbers since mid-April, “probably between 15 percent to 20 percent” weekly. On the day that lower fares went into effect, ridership increased 40 percent, another company spokesperson said. Ticket purchases in the week before the rate drop rose 18 percent to 20 percent.
Bather”™s 40-ride ticket from Yonkers now costs $320, a 20 percent savings. A one-way ticket costs $10, a 17 percent saving.
Tom Fox, president and CEO of New York Water Taxi, said the company hopes the reduced fares and promotional efforts this spring and summer will turn the year-old ferry line into “a thriving environmentally friendly and economically viable transportation option for residents of Rockland and Westchester that services redevelopment and revitalization along the Hudson and in lower Manhattan.”
Noyes said the ferry operator, which has spent $40,000 on an advertising campaign, expects the increase in ridership over the next few months “will more than make up for the decrease in revenue. The strength of a ferry is it can hold a lot of people. When you start putting 100 people in the boat, it gets very profitable.”
Yonkers already has profited from the ferry service, city officials said while hosting a VIP tour of the river from Yonkers to lower Manhattan as part of Yonkers Business Week.
Tourists on deck admiring the passing views included Providence, R.I., Mayor David N. Cincilline, who has led his city in a downtown redevelopment effort similar to that in Yonkers.
“It was a terrific plus to get our economic engine going,” James Pinto, city director of downtown and waterfront development, said of the ferry line. He said it has stimulated downtown business, especially on Thursday and Friday nights, when twice as many passengers as on the morning run come up to Yonkers for restaurant dining.
“It cradles you in the morning and comforts you in the evening,” New York Water Taxi charter manager Marie Clanny said.