Aviles questions scale of Blue Highways pilot

Like many communities in the city, I mean, I'd like to talk specifically about the Blue Highway.

You mentioned in your testimony an example, and I'm so just, can you tell us more specifically

how you noted a pilot between BMT and Pier 79.

Can you be more specific about the scale and scope of that pilot and how we have used our ferry system, not just Staten Island Ferry, but how have we utilized the ferry system

to advance blue highways?

Yeah, you want to start?

Good morning.

Good morning.

Are we afternoon yet?

Almost afternoon.

Who knows?

Almost afternoon.

So for NYC DOT ferries, I had mentioned earlier, we modified our private ferry operator license so that existing operators could move micro freight on existing ferry routes.

That was very important to us.

We wanted to leverage the existing routes to try to get some of the freight off the highways and onto the waterfront, onto the vessels.

So, so far we have had one pilot go to Pier 79 and that was a company called Dutch X who was moving micro freight from Brooklyn to the west side of Manhattan.

That was very successful, but they ran into some logistical issues on the Dutch X side.

So much of the ferry side.

Yeah, Dutchess has gone from Red Hook, right?

They were on the water, Red Hook.

I'm not sure where they are.

Yeah, they moved on.

Yeah, they're done.

They've left Pier 11, and they're looking for new space along the waterfront.

Got it.

Okay, so how much freight was moved during that pilot?

I'd have to get back to you with that.

I don't have it today.

I think, you know, I...

Pilots are important, right, to obviously proof of concept, but it really does seem like this pilot is minuscule for the scale and scope of our commitment to moving freight, particularly from a community that is deluge with trucks,

has an abundance of waterfront, and nothing is getting moved by the water.

So I guess my message in short is,

We want to see a much more aggressive position to using our current infrastructure, not just the things we need to build out.

I'm glad the sky port is eventually going to get there.

But we do have, we're moving vessels throughout the city, and how we are not leveraging that in a more aggressive way is really surprising to me.

So I don't know if you want to respond to that.

No, I mean, we certainly share the opportunity that the waterways offer in terms of freight.

I think the counterbalance may be just on the other end of that node for that pilot, and that's why we're starting a crawl-walk.

Kind of run approach is we want to make sure that we're integrating these e-quads or e-bikes with, you know, integrating it carefully with the surrounding streetscape on the other end of the node.

So it's always a balance.

And that's why we're looking at separate or in addition to the ferry landings are can we have dedicated landings for blue highways where you don't have necessarily that conflict or you can design it even better.

So that's, you know, you mentioned downtown Skyport.

We're very excited to bring that one online by the end of next year.

And we look forward to activating other nodes along the waterfront specific to Blue Highway's shipment.