New York’s Staten Island Ferry runs 5.2 miles across the harbor for free, 24 hours a day; the 25-minute ride carries well over 16 million passengers a year

Somewhere between the $18 movie ticket, the $7 latte, and the "convenience fees" tacked onto a $12 concert ticket, most young Americans have accepted a grim truth: nothing is free anymore. Airlines charge for carry-ons, and parking apps charge to allow you to pay for parking; even "free" checking accounts have asterisks. So it's almost suspicious that one of the most scenic boat rides in the country, past the Statue of Liberty, across New York Harbor, costs exactly nothing, and has been fare-free since 1997.

According to the NYC Department of Transportation, the Staten Island Ferry spans 5.2 miles from Manhattan to Staten Island, 24 hours a day every day of the year, with well over 16 million riders annually, from commuters to tourists and some who just wanted a free skyline view without paying for a helicopter tour or $40 boat cruise. It's the rare New York institution that hasn't found a way to monetize themselves yet, which makes it worth a closer look.

How a toll became a freebie


This ferry itself isn't new; its roots trace back to 1817, run by a steamboat operator called the Richmond Turnpike Company, that was later bought up and expanded upon by Cornelius Vanderbilt. The city took over operations in 1905, but the "free" part is much younger than people give credit for. Riders paid a fare, a nickel for most of the 20th-century, 50 cents, up until July 1997, when the city decided to eliminate the walk-on fare entirely. That decision, under a very different New York, turned a working class commuter route into pretty much exactly what it is today: a free public attraction that moves nearly 45,000 people on a typical weekday.

Why "free" is a bigger deal than it sounds

Here's the part where most US commuters elsewhere should start to feel jealous, but also annoyed: many US cities still treat "free transit" as a radical, unproven experiment. New York quietly ran that exact experiment on one of its busiest transit routes almost thirty years ago, and it worked well enough that the city simply never went back to charging a fare. According to a 2023 report titled “Considering Fare-Free Transit in The Context of Research on Transit Service and Pricing: A Research Synthesis,” from the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, eliminating fares reliably boost ridership, but have long found that riders respond much more favorably to improved service (more frequent buses, less waiting) than to price cuts. In other words, free is nice, but reliable is what people want. That research looked mainly at incremental fare changes, not a fare being scrapped entirely and permanently, so applying it directly to the ferry is a bit of a stretch. Even so, the ferry happens to land on both sides of the finding: it's "free" (no fare) and "reliable" (runs 24 hours a day), a combination that's extremely rare in US transit systems.

That's because the debate over fare-free transit systems has been heating up nationally, from Boston's pilot fare-free bus systems, to smaller systems up and down Washington state. A 2024 study titled “Does fare-free transit increase labor-force participation and reduce income inequality?,” published in the Journal of Public Transportation found that while fare-free policies do reliably boost ridership, they don't automatically help on bigger issues like labor-force participation or income inequality on their own. Free transit is helpful, but it isn't a magic bullet for a country that has had chronically underfunded public transportation for decades: a criticism that applies just as much to New York's subway fare hikes as it does to whatever bus system exists in most American suburbs.

The tourist trap that isn't a trap

What makes this ferry so great for younger people specifically, is that it accidentally became one of the best "free things to do in NYC" recommendations in every travel blog and social media itinerary that's out there; not because the city marketed it that way, but because in truth, it actually is one of the only ways to see the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline without paying for a Circle Line ticket, or a rooftop bar cover charge.

While the Staten Island Ferry is certainly no hidden gem, locals have known about it for a long time, it's the rare functioning example of a US city that made a choice not to charge for something it could have, in a country where almost every form of mobility has a price tag attached to it.