Ferries from Port Imperial / Weehawken

Somebody spent $9.7 million on a footbridge here. It connects a light rail platform to a ferry slip about a hundred metres away, and it is the clearest statement of what Port Imperial is: not a pier that boats happen to use, but an interchange assembled deliberately on a strip of former rail yard, with the ferry as one mode among four.

Four ways in and out of the same forecourt

• Ferry — the terminal opened in May 2006, built and run by NY Waterway.
• Hudson-Bergen Light Rail — the station opened earlier, on 29 October 2005. The pedestrian bridge linking it to the boats was finished in June 2013.
• Buses — NJ Transit routes 23, 156, 158 and 159, plus NY Waterway's own free shuttles at peak hours and along River Road.
• Parking — a garage of about 850 spaces, broken ground in June 2011, open around the clock.

That combination is the reason the crossing works. Ten minutes of water is easy; it is the twenty minutes either side that usually kills a commuter ferry, and this terminal was built to remove them.

⚠ Two different timetables share one terminal

The routes from here are not equivalent, and our timetable shows the split clearly:

• Midtown / W. 39th St. — 65 sailings out and 66 back, roughly 10 minutes. This one runs all day, seven days a week, into the small hours.
• Pier 11 / Wall St. — 7 sailings out, 6 back, 20 to 24 minutes. Weekday peaks and weekends.
• Brookfield Place — 4 sailings. Weekday rush hours.
• Hoboken 14th St. — 13 out, 9 back; Edgewater — 5 each way.

Turning up mid-afternoon expecting a boat to Wall Street is the standard mistake. Midtown is the service; downtown is a commuter product with commuter hours.

What was here before

Tidal marsh, then the rail yards of the West Shore Railroad, then shipping terminals — including a United Fruit Company banana warehouse. The waterfront was industrial for a century and the residential towers are recent.

The cliffs immediately behind are also where Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr fought their duel in 1804; the actual ledge was cut away by the railway. It is an unusual amount of history for a place most people experience as a ten-minute crossing.

Getting to the boat

If you are arriving by light rail, use the footbridge — that is what it is for, and the alternative is a walk around the parking structure. If you are driving, the garage runs twenty-four hours, which matters because the last Midtown departures are close to midnight.

Tickets come from machines, the ticket window or the operator's app. There is no advance reservation on these crossings; you turn up and board.

Where it sits in the network

Port Imperial is the busiest New Jersey terminal in our data by sailing count, and its Manhattan counterpart is Midtown / W. 39th St. Between them they account for the great majority of movements on this stretch of the Hudson.

Everything from here is a river crossing. There are no long-distance sailings, no vehicles carried, and no seasonal timetable in the way an island route has one — this is public transport that happens to float.