Woodstock, the little boat that takes people and their bikes between Bohol Immigration Park in Western Alameda and the dock at the end of Broadway in Oakland, is set to expand from five days of service a week to six. Currently, the water shuttle only runs from Wednesday through Sunday.
The expanded service begins July 8. From the city's announcement:
The new schedule will be in place for at least four months and longer if it's successful and we have adequate funding. The changes include:
- New Tuesday service! Tuesday will have the same schedule as Wednesday and Thursday, which will not change from what it is today.
- Expanded Friday, Saturday and Sunday service! More trips and longer operating hours.
- 63 trips per day - a 26% increase
- 15 hours of service - 7:20 am to 10:30pm
- Shorter breaks in service
- Same morning departures across six days!
- The first 9 departures of every day will be at the same time
We hope this 35% increase in weekly departures and the other enhancements will lure in new riders and encourage all of our existing riders to use Woodstock more often!
The little boat's been ridden by over 100,000 passengers since it started running just under a year ago. Alameda is also starting to look at expanding it to seven days a week, which will require a second boat. "And yes, we are starting to look into options for buying a second boat!" wrote Sarah Henry, a spokesperson for the city, in an email to Streetsblog.
As readers are probably aware, the boat ride, which is only about six minutes long, connects Oakland's Amtrak station, BART stations, and the thousands of housing units in Jack London Square, with the large shopping center, playground, and townhouses of Western Alameda. The boat's success is dramatic proof that there's demand for a bicycle and pedestrian water crossing, in the form of either a lift bridge or an expanded, purpose-built ferry shuttle with dedicated docks. Woodstock, the current ferry, nice as it is, wasn't really designed as a shuttle and the service uses the public docks on either side of the estuary. Because of that, the boat spends more time docking and undocking than actually crossing the channel. And Streetsblog has observed that operations are sometimes slowed by privately owned boats that share the docks.
The popularity of the boat again calls into question the logic of the multi-million dollar Jackson Street/880-freeway ramp widening, misnomered the "Oakland Alameda Access Project." This retrograde project aims to add some marginal car capacity to the Posey Tube between Oakland and Western Alameda by reconfiguring the ramps. It would also lengthen and widen the Oak Street off-ramp and create a new frontage road through Chinatown.
As the success of Woodstock demonstrates, "access" between Oakland and Alameda can be improved in reality by providing a water shuttle for people. Upgrading the water shuttle and expanding it to a full-time, permanent service would cost far less than yet another freeway widening that will just increase pollution and induce more traffic.
