Congestion in Portland is a major issue. The Oregon Department of Transportation is slated to spend over $700M to widen and “improve” Interstate-5. The project has received a lot of criticism. Transportation advocates warn of induced demand - the reality that more roadway begets more cars, resulting in more congestion, an endless cycle.
The City of Portland has one throughway that is not victim to congestion, the Willamette River. Introducing the Frog Ferry, a proposed passenger ferry that aims to alleviate congestion on Portland’s highways while addressing environmental and emergency management issues.
The Frog Ferry is slated to begin running in the summer of 2022 as a pilot program lasting two years. The ferry will run from Cathedral Park in St. Johns to the RiverPlace Dock on the South Waterfront, a commute lasting 30 minutes and costing $3.00. The final iteration will begin in Vancouver, WA, providing commuters an alternative to heavily congested I5, ending in Oregon City. The pilot route will be part of a program to run as “proof of concept” for riders and investors while gathering data on performance and public appeal.
The ferry was proposed in 2017, but did not receive funding until last year. The Oregon Department of Transportation awarded the non-profit “Friends of Frog Ferry” $200,000 accompanied by a $40,000 grant from the Portland Bureau of Transportation to conduct a feasibility study.
The pilot service will consist of one ferry, with a capacity of 70 passengers operating six days a week. While the pilot ferry will run on renewable diesel, the non-profit envisions a fully electric fleet for its service. According to the Friends of Frog Ferry, the water route will eliminate 600 automobile trips with a total of 1,000 passengers a day. This will prevent 3,170 metric tons of CO2 from being emitted, for perspective - that would take a forest of 3,884 acres over the course of one year to sequester that much carbon dioxide.
The ferry will not have the capacity to carry motor vehicles, but will have bike parking as well as connections to public transportation.
In addition to environmental purposes, the ferry aims to act as an emergency response vehicle, aiding in the city’s resilience efforts. A ferry, while bound by the natural environment, does not have a fixed route. The infrastructure can act as an evacuation vehicle, unreliant on bridges and roads deemed to fail in the event of an earthquake.
I was most curious about the permitting process of running a passenger ferry service. This is outlined in Section 6 of the feasibility study published last year.
The ferry must gain approval from both Washington and Oregon, as it will eventually extend to Vancouver. Permits are processed through the Corps of Engineers in Vancouver and Portland. Both states use the same permitting process, adhering to the same standards and regulations making the permitting process fairly easy.
Federally, the Corps of Engineers, Department of State Lands, and Washing State Fish and Wildlife will require permits due to the presence of endangered species in the river. These are just some of the requirements of implementing transportation infrastructure on the Willamette River.
Personally, I hope to see this ferry a success - for the reduction of congestion on our roads and elimination of carbon dioxide emissions in our air.
By Anthony TortoriciSources
https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator
Hi, Anthony, thanks for the fascinating blog post! I think it is a very interesting decision to have this ferry be only for cyclists and pedestrians. I was concerned that if this ferry allowed vehicles, then it could also succumb to induced demand (or Jevon's Paradox, to give credit to one of the original authors of the social-economic theory). I would like to think that it was a good decision to generally prohibit vehicles form the ferry. I also like that the ferry serves two purposes — to move people generally across and up and down the river, and for emergency management in case of natural and/or human-induced disasters. Considering time costs, I wonder whether people will actually maximize the use of it as a commuting option instead using the I-5 bridge. Is the 30-minute ferry commute across the river shorter than the I-5 bridge commute? Do you think people will be deterred from using the ferry considering their time costs commuting from their origin to the ferry origin trip end and from the ferry destination trip end to their destination? How may this ferry affect park-and-ride demand/capacity at all trip ends?
ReplyDeleteI think this ferry would be a great commute solution for people who don't have a car and need to commute to Portland. As someone who doesn't own a car, in order to find work that I can reasonably commute to via bike and conventional transit, I need to live fairly central. This is a common scenario for many people. However, if you get priced out of inner Portland, but need to keep commuting into town and you still don't own a car, your options aren't very good.
ReplyDeleteYes, you may be able to afford your rent or mortgage better now that you live farther out. But the savings from a lower housing cost may not take you very far. In the worst case scenario, they'd go to buy a car to make the commute happen (and if this is the case, you might as well have kept paying expensive rent in town). Your third option is to have to find a job in Vancouver, which you don't want to do because the whole point of being here was to live (or at least work) in Portland.
This ferry solves all of these problems! You can keep your saved money from a lower cost of living by not needing to buy a car, you don't need to spend inordinate amounts of time figuring out how to make that bike-and-transit commute (not to mention the commute itself, which is likely to be at least 1 hour long in each direction), and you don't have to fully relocate to Vancouver!
I think there are other benefits to society from this ferry. I think it could help improve our relationship to our water bodies. Because so much of Portland's waterfront is dedicated to industrial uses, we don't have much of a relationship to our rivers. Replacing a toxic commute with time spent on the water would be absolutely beneficial.