Sunset Park Ferry Stop Threatened in NYCEDC’s 2025 South Brooklyn Route Overhaul

Hélène Filion Onserud

Sunset Park Ferry Stop Threatened in NYCEDC’s 2025 South Brooklyn Route Overhaul
The Sunset Park/Brooklyn Army Terminal ferry landing, set to lose South Brooklyn line service under the 2025 plan.

NYC Ferry, launched in 2017, is an initiative of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) in partnership with the City of New York. For a reasonable fee, it gave New Yorkers the ability to travel on many of the city’s waterways and have access to the city’s waterfronts. And although not part of the transit system, NYC Ferry provides opportunities for New Yorkers to connect with areas of the five boroughs that had not been easily accessible to them before. The ferry to Rockaway is one example. The trip on the ferry from Sunset Park to Rockaway takes 38 minutes, compared to the hour and a half it easily takes by public transportation. Similarly, traveling from Sunset Park to Red Hook takes 22 minutes by ferry, about half the time that it takes by public transportation.

The 2025 NYC Ferry Network Optimization Plan aims to make changes to some NYC Ferry routes. The reasons given for the changes are that they will: Give you more places to go by better connecting routes to Midtown and Lower Manhattan. Speed up your commute by reducing the number of stops made on trips. Make more seats available on our busiest routes during peak hours, weekends and other times of year. Operate more efficiently by combining routes and eliminating empty vessels. Reduce the subsidy per-rider by increasing ridership and making these changes with limited new costs.

A phrase from the previous initiative, NYC Ferry Forward, launched in 2022, caught my attention: “These changes are designed to improve equity and access to the ferry, especially for lower-income New Yorkers, while also making it more financially sustainable and reducing the amount of public subsidy required to operate the system over time.” While I see references in the 2025 Plan to making NYC Ferry more financially sustainable and the need to reduce the per-rider subsidy, I don’t see any reference to the improvement of equity for lower-income New Yorkers. It seems as if this goal vanished over the last three years.

Sunset Park is historically an immigrant and working-class neighborhood, and the planned changes are not to its advantage. Sunset Park appears to be a casualty of both the missing goal I just mentioned, and low ridership, losing its station on the South Brooklyn route. And this is planned while Bay Ridge, a more affluent neighborhood, gets an express route to Wall Street, with one stop at Atlantic Avenue, thereby granting those riders access to all other points on the South Brooklyn route.

Rather than eliminate Sunset Park from the South Brooklyn route, NYCEDC needs to remember the important equity goal it set only three years ago, and, if ridership is the issue, have an outreach plan to get more Sunset Park ridership on the South Brooklyn Route.

Another way in which the Plan fails Sunset Park is the system it uses to collect comments. It was a lengthy process for me to figure out how to share my comment about Sunset Park losing its South Brooklyn stop. To remedy that situation, I started a petition which anyone is welcome to join. Click here to get to the petition. The deadline for comments is September 1st so we need to move quickly to get enough signatures to influence NYCEDC’s decision.