BOSTON — Five o'clock on a sticky summer Friday. As usual, the main link between Boston and all points south, the Southeast Expressway--a.k.a. the Distressway--was going nowhere. Locked solid.
Headed home in the midst of the soap opera known as Rush Hour, John Buckley, a partner at Coopers & Lybrand, was reading the Atlantic Monthly. His friend Jim O'Hare, a brokerage executive here, was relaxing in his deck chair, grabbing some late-afternoon rays. Behind them, two young men were solving the problems of the universe, bottled beer in hand. Nearby, a trio of young women stopped talking about the stock market long enough to start hashing about their boyfriends. While the sea air ruffled his hair, a bearded man in the lotus position was either meditating or had fallen sound asleep.
Wait a minute: This is a commute?
"No," said Buckley. "This is heaven."
Increasingly, that opinion is shared by Bay State commuters who are giving new meaning to the term "one if by sea." Earlier this month, the fifth major commuter ferry line opened in Boston, linking the city to its suburbs in an ever-widening net. Joined by an additional half-dozen smaller services, the Boston harbor passenger ferries carry nearly 60,000 passengers per week--more than quadruple the figure of five years ago.
Boston's aquatic commuters--who boast that they arrive at their destinations happy and relaxed, regardless of weather and oblivious to traffic--are part of a burgeoning national family of 225,000 ferry aficionados each day. Passenger ferry service is booming between New York and New Jersey. Along with the well-established Marin County ferry, a new route connects San Francisco and Vallejo, 70 minutes to the north. In Seattle, a new high-speed ferry to and from Bremerton is so popular that transit officials have taken to issuing boarding passes. The faster vessel, Washington state ferry officials said, helped push ridership from 10,400 to 38,400 in a month.
Passenger ferries are under discussion in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. Proposals are on the board to increase service on Long Island Sound. Authorities in Massachusetts are closely watching the Boston-Salem route, which debuted July 1, in hopes of expanding the water routes still more.
Much of the impetus comes from $38 million in potential federal subsidies. But commuters also have flocked to ferries to escape miserable trips on crowded highways. In the Boston area, terrible traffic happened to intersect with terrific new marine technology--some of it developed for use in the Persian Gulf War.
