Maloney asks how EDC evaluates new ferry routes

And one final question before I pass to the majority leader.

How, when you're evaluating new ferry routes and landings, how do you decide what is viable?

How do you consider what would be a good new route?

And what criteria can you share with the public so that the communities that are requesting services have a better understanding into how these decisions are made?

Yeah, absolutely.

There's a lot that go into it, of course.

You know, when we're looking at new services, a couple of different things that come to mind.

So as a starting point, ridership potential is one of the most important things.

Anything we build, we want it to be useful.

We want it to be delivering for New Yorkers.

We want people to use it.

And it's not to say that we're only looking at the highest ridership places.

You know, you might have slightly lower but very impactful ridership.

So we take a look at all the impacts related to who would ride, what they would get out of it.

Is a ferry, for example, faster than the train in some places?

The geography of certain bays and areas in New York mean that you might have to go around a pretty large landmass.

So when we look at ridership, we are thinking about what people's alternatives are.

In terms of actual sites, there's a lot that we think about on both the upland and the in-water side.

From an upland perspective, we want sites that are very accessible to neighborhoods or commercial areas, right?

We don't want it to be behind a highway.

We don't want it to be through a stark walking corridor that people are not comfortable with.

If those conditions exist, we need to figure out ways to improve those, which does often...

come with cost, but those are important parts so that people would be comfortable using some of these.

On the water side, while starting out in this, I was not as oriented towards maritime, and in Google Maps you see anywhere that's blue is a place you can put a ferry, but in fact the depth of the water, the direction of the water flow,

the nearby operations, if there are in-water existing recreational users, there's a lot of different pieces that we check.

Are there subway tunnels underneath?

Like, you know, all the pieces that we want to think about, which are really critical to the construction.

All of these kind of drive towards capital and operating costs that we look at.

But I really also want to make sure that we're talking about the economic justice indicators that we are focused on, especially as part of the vision.

In the vision, we're looking at things like income, demographics, existing access to jobs, and making sure that we are evaluating, as I said, not only high ridership places, but impactful ridership.

And so a lot of that is part of it.