With plans currently underway for a new ferry terminal and its own designated stop on the Capitol Corridor train line, which provides service between San Jose and the Sacramento area, the sleepy town of Hercules finds itself poised to be the region’s next major transit hub.
By Bill Picture
Published: October, 2006
What the City of Hercules, the San Francisco Bay Water Transit Authority (WTA) and the Union Pacific Railroad envision is a single terminal that will link ferry service and rail service with existing bus service in West Contra Costa County.
If you arrive by bus or walk in from the street, you [will] enter a terminal building where you can buy a train ticket or a ferry ticket, explains Community Development Director for the City of Hercules, Steve Lawton. The terminal building will lead you to a bridge across the railroad tracks, where you can either descend to a [train] platform or continue down a bridge to the waiting ferry.
The agencies’ shared vision also calls for the development of a mixed-use Water Transit Village on land directly adjacent to the proposed tri-modal terminal. Los Angeles-based developer Anderson Pacific, LLC is designing the Water Transit Village, which will contain several hundred residential units, along with thousands of square feet of office space and retail space in a Main Street-like setting.
According to Lawton, this comprehensive plan reflects a desire on the part of city officials here in the Bay Area and local transit agencies to meet the changing needs of commuters, more and more of whom are opting for the convenience of living near public transit, in order to encourage ridership.
[So] transit stations will no longer be surrounded by parking lots, Lawton explains. Instead, they will be surrounded by [homes]. [And] that is how you get the volume of ridership that allows transit to work effectively. If you drive to transit, the urge is to keep on driving. The new thinking is that you walk to transit and leave your car at home.
Water-transit-linked community developments, like the one being planned in Hercules, were the theme of a recent conference organized by the Water Transit Authority. At that conference, WTA officials explained that fostering sensible land use to complement ferry terminals and encourage ridership is the key to the success of the agency’s plan to expand ferry service.
Hercules was just one of seven ferry-friendly sites identified in a recent study commissioned by the WTA. That study assessed the cost effectiveness and viability of potential sites based on projected ridership numbers.
Hercules was a no-brainer because of the potential to link to rail, says Steve Castleberry, chief executive officer of the Water Transit Authority. Jack London Square and South San Francisco both have a lot of potential in that regard as well.
City officials in Hercules are hoping that the ferry-rail-bus link will help put the small community, a former company town that, until 1977, was home to one of the country’s largest dynamite plants, on the map.
Right now, we’re sort of a non-entity, explains Steve Lawton. When you ask somebody where Hercules is, they give you a blank look. Once we’ve established ferry service and rail service, we believe that more people will consider moving here. And companies will consider locating their offices here. For the people who already live in Hercules, they’re going to see their property values go up. So this could really make this town.
Train service will be the first to come online in Hercules. The city expects to begin reviewing designs for the train stop before year’s end. And Lawton expects that Sacramento- and San Jose-bound commuters will be able to board a Capitol Corridor train in Hercules by 2010, at the latest.
Assuming we get the money issue settled, I think we’ll see ferry service by 2012, he adds.
Funding is just one of the challenges facing the WTA and the City of Hercules. The other is an environmental one. Establishing ferry service to Hercules will very likely require that a channel be dredged through the shallow water of San Pablo Bay.
Still, Steve Castleberry believes that the project’s environmental impact will be minimal, and he is confident that any issues can be easily mitigated. To that end, the WTA has already hired Ventura-based firm Impact Sciences to complete a thorough environmental impact study, the results of which should be available soon.
The money issue, on the other hand, is a little more complicated. Once the agencies come up with the money to establish ferry service, they must then find the money to operate it.
Ferries are lighter on [start-up costs] than, say, BART. But ferries are more expensive to operate, Steve Lawton explains. Fuel costs are high, and labor is expensive.
Further complicating matters is the fact that ferries, which currently serve fewer people than the other 28 transit agencies in the area, must compete with those agencies for state funding.
It’s not impossible, but it’s a challenge, says Steve Castleberry. But we’re moving forward [with the environmental impact study] because we believe that [the project] is a good investment. When it comes to transportation projects in the Bay Area, if you waited until all the money was in place, you’d never get anything done.
