7 Outages This Month: Recurrent Ferry Disruptions Upset Commuters

ASTORIA, QUEENS — The Astoria ferry landing is one of 25 piers in the city's waterway transit network, but during the past month electrical outages have closed the dock almost every week.

The first disruption came on Monday Jan. 3 at 3 p.m., but the pier was back up-and-running after 30 minutes. Five days later an outage halted service at the landing for almost two hours.

Astorians started to take notice. "Heads-up," wrote one on a community forum, alerting other passengers to an afternoon outage on Tuesday Jan. 11 — one of the first days when temperatures in NYC dipped below freezing. "You don't want to walk over there in this cold and not have a ride."

About two hours later service was restored, but disruptions continued like this all month, with the dock going out of service four subsequent times — amount to seven total disruptions in service in January.

A spokesperson from the New York City Economic Development Corporation, or EDC, which responded to Patch's inquiry about the outages, said that NYC Ferry is "working diligently to diagnose the cause and identify a permanent solution," noting that most disruptions have been resolved "quickly."

Most of January's outages only lasted an hour or two (an overnight outage on Jan. 12, which ended service for the evening, stand as an exception), but more than half were during the weekday, when some Astorians depend on the ferry for commuting — prompting grumbling from locals who get to work on the boats.

"Welp. Getting to the job I'm forced to do in the office five days a week just got a lot harder," wrote one, eliciting dozens of upvotes by other locals.

When asked how the NYC Ferry responds to commuters who are frustrated with the closures, the EDC said that it "regrets these disruptions to service" and encouraged commuters to follow ferry alerts.

Electrical outages aren't the only thing upsetting New Yorkers about the city's ferry system.

The notoriously expensive boats recently got a multi-million-dollar infusion of tax dollars, THE CITY reported, prompting experts to express concern about the ferry's rapid expansion and longterm sustainability.

"It’s really expensive to operate, it requires pretty significant subsidies, and this doesn’t really fix that problem," Sean Campion, a senior research associate for Citizens Budget Commission, a group that monitors the city's budget, told THE CITY.

"Instead of pursuing options to make it more financially sustainable like increasing fare or cutting service on lower ridership routes, this sort of shifts the problem," he said.