The Balboa Island Ferry has served Newport Beach for more than 100 years. Can it survive in California's Green Age?
More than 1.5 million people and 300,000 automobiles use the Balboa ferries every year. On the afternoon I went, however, they were mostly empty. Spring break was over, and Memorial Day was weeks away.“The calm before the storm,” joked operations manager Nate Capra. But a typhoon of tourists wasn’t the only incoming problem on his mind.
That’s why the Air Resources Board ruled that short-run ferries have only until the end of 2025 to convert to zero-emission engines, even though there’s all of one such ferry right now in California to prove zero-emission short-run ferries can even be dependable. I hopped onto the next ferry toward the peninsula and chatted with Balboa Island residents Roger Barakat and Karla Vandenberg. “Not everything will work better with electricity,” Barakat said as Vandenberg took out her cellphone to record the short trip. “These are just fine the way they are.”
When I returned to Balboa Island, Seymour Beek was waiting at the dock to talk to me. His father took over the ferry in 1919 from someone else but made his riches by helping to develop Balboa Island. Today, Beek and his family run it out of a sense of noblesse oblige. “We’re one of thousands of boats in the harbor, and we burn way cleaner,” Beek said. “I think they [the Air Resources Board] saw short-run ferries as a category they could easily make a rule on.”and current Assemblymember Diane Dixon to see if the Air Resources Board could give him an extension. She’s also not wholly opposed to having the Balboa ferries go zero-emission.
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