“Discount Ticket Booklets
There are three types of ticket books, offering commuters and frequent riders extra convenience and savings.

10-Ticket Book (yields 5 roundtrip rides) $45.00
20-Ticket Book (yields 10 roundtrip rides) $80.00
40-Ticket Book (yields 20 roundtrip rides) $150.00

40-ticket book tickets are only valid within month purchased. Commuter checks can be used for the purchase of discount ticket booklets. ”

Note that both the 10 and 20 ticket books do not expire and both contain a free transfer from AC and Muni. BART has an AC Transit transfer program but MUNI (the largest transit provider) is left out (well, $0.25 discount). Thus, for the thinking person, the spurious $12 fare is overstated.

Then we talk about fare box recovery ratios. If you bother to peek behind the scenes, you will find that MTC ignores depreciation in comparing ratios. Thus asset heavy systems like BART look good compared to asset light (no right of way costs) systems like ferries. BART recently gained a $900 million bond to upgrade things and wants another $4 billion. So depreciation represents real money. But under a highly artificial yardstick, ferries appear unproductive.

It’s merely a question of designing the rules for a planned result. The fact that so many people are incapable of reading an annual report (BART comes to mind) results in folks who believe what they think they have heard. In no way is this comment to be BART bashing, just to make folks aware that we are comparing apples to oranges.

For a full (and hopefully amusing) discussion of depreciation and related transit issues, I would direct you to:

http://baycrossings.com/dispnews.asp?id=380

http://www.baycrossings.com/dispnews.asp?id=344

The ferry is an inefficient use of transit resources. It serves an amazingly small number of riders, most of whom are not transit-dependent, offers an extremely limited and inflexible service, pollutes the air and water, and costs a fortune.

We can look at efficiency, fare-box recovery, etc for more meaningful comparisons — but then we still need to factor in the value of having diverse options for people who live in very different situations, plus redundancy which has a value of its own in emergencies.

We’re talking about a $500 million plan to expand a service that currently serves 10,000 people a day! With a long term goal of increasing that to only 30,000 people a day 20 years from now! BART serves more than 300,000 people every day. AC transit serves over 200,000 daily. And to say that the ferry was the most popular mode of transit during Spare the Air is disingenuous. It’s true that the ferry had the largest percentage increase in ridership, but that’s easy to do when you have no riders to begin with. In terms of actual numbers of new riders, BART attracted twice as many new commuters than the ferry.

Furthermore, the ferry is hardly a shining example of energy efficiency.

Yes, at $12/day round trip, the ferry is too expensive to serve as a practical transit alternative for most commuters. But given the extremely limited number of people the ferry will ever serve, I can’t see how subsidizing their commute at the expense of more efficient transit options could reasonably considered a wise decision.