[timbad]

Chron article about a test run of the ferry service to TI and the fact that things are to be going much more vertical come the new year.

I didn't realize the ferry terminal had been completed.

Wednesday, for the first time, city officials, and the reporters accompanying them, were given a preview of what the future might feel like for those willing to live in the 8,000 housing units slated to pop up on the 400-acre man-made island and former naval base between San Francisco and Oakland.

... the trip across the bay ... took only five minutes and 52 seconds.

Just before noon, about four dozen people, including Mayor London Breed, were whisked from the Ferry Building to the new $50 million terminal on Treasure Island. There they were given a tour of the two new housing complexes under construction, as well as the less sexy $600 million worth of infrastructure work that will make it possible for as many as 20,000 residents to eventually reside on the island.

There are bulldozers laying out streets and sidewalks and streetlights are going in. Three new water tanks, connected to water sources in both San Francisco and Oakland, hold 5.3 million cubic gallons. There is a new switchyard and wastewater treatment plant.



The first residents who will move into new Treasure Island housing will arrive next year.

January will bring the opening of the Bristol, a 124-condo complex that straddles a hillside on Yerba Buena Island, the steep, rocky outcropping that is connected to Treasure Island by a short causeway. Then in March, Chinatown Community Development Center and Swords to Plowshares will open Maceo May Apartments, a 104-unit affordable housing building that will largely be available to formerly homeless veterans.

Once that building is populated, the pace of development will accelerate rapidly, according to Chris Meany of Wilson Meany, the lead developer on the island. By spring, Meany’s group will start work on Tidal House, a mid-rise with 249 homes on the parcel closest to the ferry terminal. And the next affordable housing building, 138 units being built by Catholic Charities and Mercy Housing, will also be under construction.

Of the 10 parcels slated to be developed in the 1,800-unit, first phase of the project, eight of them are in the construction drawing phase and likely to be under construction in the next three years, Meany said.

Now that the vertical development has started, the whole 8,000-unit neighborhood — with a hotel and retail and parks — will explode “in a blink of an eye — if the blink of an eye is 10 to 15 years,” he said.

Meanwhile, the ferry is being tested and will start carrying the public in January. There will be 17 trips a day, and it will cost $5. For the first few years the ferry will be a 48-passenger aluminum boat specifically built for the bay that goes 40 mph. It will be operated by Prop SF. Once the service is established, the San Francisco Bay Area Water Emergency Transportation Authority will take over with 100-passenger ferries.