Better linking New York City’s ferry system with the regional ground transit system could help unlock tens of thousands of new housing units along the city’s waterfront.
Nine years since its creation, NYC Ferry has proven to be a viable sightseeing amenity but not a reliable mass transit system for growing waterfront neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. If City Hall wants to build even more housing in these areas, NYCEDC should stop funding the ferry like a tourist attraction and integrate it into the commuter network.
Three changes could unlock thousands of housing units.
- First, the ferry should be incorporated into the OMNY system to allow for easier payment and transfer to MTA-operated transit.
- Second, integrated schedules and better physical connectivity between ferry landings and subway and bus lines in Lower Manhattan and 42nd Street would further strengthen the ferry’s role as a transit option for commuters. Adding new ferry stops in neighborhoods that will be rezoned for new housing would seed development.
- Finally, an expansion could offer new connections to the region’s three major airports.
The ferry system, piloted as the East River Ferry in 2011 and launched in 2017 as NYC Ferry, has carried more than 50 million riders across six routes and roughly 25 landings across all five boroughs, a genuine success by recreational ridership standards. But the system’s design and its ridership statistics reveal its true purpose.
Built to run “expansive service, year-round across all five boroughs at a low fare” rather than to move commuters efficiently at peak hours, NYC Ferry’s per-rider subsidy dwarfs peer systems. A 2025 city comptroller audit found that each $2.75 passenger ride was costing NYCEDC $8.59, with little payback during the morning and evening rush hours when ridership should be surging.
In fact, more people ride the ferry on weekends than during the workweek. On top of that, the ferry’s disconnect from the MTA means riders must pay a separate fare when transferring to the subway or bus.
Over the past 20 years, waterfront communities have added tens of thousands of new residents and still represent the city’s greatest opportunity to build new homes. The ferry should be a convenient and reliable way for residents of these neighborhoods to get to work and school. Coordinating timetables, enabling free transfers through OMNY, and treating ferry landings as nodes in the regional transit map rather than standalone attractions would go a long way toward making the ferry a real commute option rather than a weekend novelty.
Critically, in places like Queens, the Southeast Bronx and South Brooklyn, where more residential development is anticipated but transit infrastructure lags behind, the city should leverage the ferry system to solve the transit problem before, not after, density arises. Building ferry landings and linkages to the bus and subway systems before thousands of new units are delivered will give planners a credible answer to questions about how new residents will get to work and help assuage community wariness. Every waterfront rezoning in Sunset Park, Throgs Neck or Port Morris becomes a stronger bet if an affordable, subway-integrated ferry ride to Wall Street or Midtown is part of the pitch.
The ferry could also offer an alternative to taxi, Uber or proposed train-to-plane routes between the city’s business districts and LaGuardia, JFK and Newark airports, all of which are located on the waterfront, creating a multiplying effect across the system. When transit networks interconnect, ridership grows exponentially because every new connection multiplies the number of viable trips across the entire system.
For nine years, NYC Ferry has offered New Yorkers a pleasant, heavily subsidized way to get to the beach and go sightseeing. As the city prepares to double down on its goal to build more housing along the waterfront, it’s time to reimagine the ferry as an integrated component of a regional transit web that seamlessly connects New Yorkers with the places they need to go.
