Woodstock, the Estuary Water Shuttle, Remains Out of Service

First it was a couple of days. Then it was a week. Now word has come down that Woodstock, the water shuttle that plies the estuary between Oakland’s Jack London Square and Alameda’s Bohol Immigrant Park, will be out of service until August 18.

According to San Francisco Bay Ferry, which operates the service, first a head gasket blew in one of its two engines on Wednesday, August 5. It was supposed to be down for a couple of days while they swapped in their spare engine. But Murphy’s Law struck—the spare engine then blew out while they were moving it back from their repair shops to the Alameda dock last week.

Unfortunately, “it’s a one-boat service,” explained SF Bay Ferry’s Tom Hall. “We don’t have any other vessels that can operate to those two docks and definitely nothing that can carry the amount of bikes.”

For the runs they do with their large vessels between San Francisco, Oakland, and other destinations, SF Bay Ferry always has a spare boat in waiting. So if a boat breaks down, they have to cancel maybe one run, explained Hall, but it doesn’t bring down the entire service. But the main ferry boats are way too big to fit the piers used by Woodstock. And since Woodstock is “just” a pilot program with limited funding, there aren’t any spares.

Hall explained that replacement engines are being shipped from a warehouse on the East Coast. Then they’ll have to be installed and tested.

Meanwhile, the city of Alameda points out that since its launch in July 2024, the route has operated on 576 of its scheduled 591 days (97 percent). And the service is being extended another two years, well beyond the pilot that was originally envisioned.

Woodstock has already exceeded all ridership expectations. It carried 251,000 passengers and 60,000 bicycles across the Estuary in its first two years of service. The city is now looking at creating a permanent service. In a post on the Alameda website, city officials confirm they are “advancing plans for a fully electric vessel to meet regulatory requirements, developing a long-term feasibility study, and identifying sustained funding sources beyond 2028.”

From Streetsblog’s view, this is a no-brainer. The shuttle has become an integral part of living in Jack London and Western Alameda. The boat is fun, but it’s not fit for purpose—Woodstock was designed as a summer party boat for short cruises on the Great Lakes. Docking it is a bit awkward and its open design is not great for cold and windy weather. But it has proven the demand for the service is off the charts and it’s long past time to build something more sustainable, frequent, and reliable along the lines of the Buiksloterweg ferry in Amsterdam. And yes, longer term there should be a bike and pedestrian bridge built across the estuary.

The money exists to do it too—but it’s being flushed away on yet another widening of the ramps that connect the Nimitz Freeway to the Posey tubes. That’s going to cost $175 million and all it will do is make pollution and congestion worse. The Woodstock pilot is screaming at policy makers that there is a better way. It was conceived as “mitigation” for the construction traffic caused by the highway widening, but in this case the mitigation is way better than the project itself. Instead of just going with the flow, our lawmakers (see pic above) need the bravery and resolve to close down the ramp widening and fund a real water shuttle and eventually a bike-and-ped bridge. That will actually improve people’s lives instead of just channeling more money to asphalt interests and the transportation dinosaurs at Caltrans.