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Passenger Vessels instead of the bus or the train. In other words, in part-time commutes, ferries may very well end up gaining, while the big losers will be buses and trains.

At this stage, it is dif? cult to pre- dict what the long-term post COVID trends will be. An extreme result may be the total disappearance of tradition- al commuting. Potentially businesses may choose to shut down their center city operations, and commuters as we know them may completely disappear.

Strangely, even then, ferries may still be the winners. Ex-commuters may migrate to relatively isolated places without existing public trans- portation infrastructure, or may choose to live in places where public transportation infrastructure can be added at low cost. And the lowest ini- tial investment public transportation infrastructure is ……. ferries.

Time for Ferries V2.0. May the smartest operators win.

For each column I write, Maritime

Reporter & Engineering News has agreed to make a small donation to an organization of my choice. For this column I nominate the Worldwide

Ferry Safety Association (https:// www.ferrysafety.org/), and in par- ticular its student design competi- tion, which has provided students with challenging design assignments for eight years now (https://www.fer- rysafetydesigncompetition.org/).

(This article originally appeared in the September 2021 edition of Mari- time Reporter & Engineering News.) www.marinelink.com MN 29|