The Bay Area has an ultramodern new ferry. Meet ‘Karl the boat'
You cannot name your San Francisco Bay Ferry vessel after a human being or a corporation. Never duplicate the name of another ship operating in San Francisco Bay. And perhaps most importantly, be very careful when taking suggestions from hormonal middle schoolers.
The transit agency received 'a lot of nominees from sixth-, seventh-, eighth-grade boys, which we didn't understand,' ferry spokesman Thomas Hall said. 'And then when we did understand, from talking to our own children, we said, 'Oh, no, that's off the list.''
SF Bay Ferry settled on 'Karl' for its new ultramodern vessel, which passed under the Golden Gate Bridge at 3 a.m. two weeks ago after a 30-hour voyage from Seattle, where it was built. The name is a Bay Area insider nod to the anthropomorphization of San Francisco's marine layer, which showed up in 2010 on social media as Karl the Fog. Karl the boat will be christened this Friday, and the new 320-passenger ferry starts taking passengers in May.
But first the Chronicle got a tour. The system's first four-engine ferry and California's cleanest workhorse ferry yet — a 'Tier 4' diesel particulate filter boat that traps soot from the engine exhaust — Karl was built as the next step in the system's quest for a zero-emissions fleet. Karl is cleaner, faster and more versatile, leading to in-house comparisons to a famous Golden State Warriors do-a-bit-of-everything player.
'These were initially designed as the Iguodalas of the fleet,' Hall said. 'They're fast enough to work out of Vallejo, big enough for all of the routes and small enough to fit in all of the marinas.'
Karl and its under-construction twin Zalophus, the scientific name for a sea lion, were named by Bay Area students who last year presented more than 350 nominations that were whittled down to 12, then voted on publicly. Other finalists included 'Painted Lady' and 'Chowder'; the latter was narrowly beaten by Zalophus and could appear on the side of a future ferry.
There were sports-related nominations, too, including nods to Willie Mays and seafaring ex-Warriors star Klay Thompson, who was a ferry rider before he bought his own boat and started commuting to Chase Center from across the bay.
'We did get some nominations to call it 'Say Hey,'' Hall said. ''Splash Brother' I thought was a pretty good nomination that didn't make it through the process.'
Hall said when Sigma was a popular nomination, he asked his teen daughter to explain the Gen Alpha term. 'She said 'No, don't name your boat that.'' (It loosely translates to a lone wolf-type of dominant male.)
Karl is a Dorado class boat, a sister ship to the sleek and fast Dorado and Delphinus, which launched in 2022 and 2024, respectively. But Karl and the Zalophus have subtle differences, including an enclosed top deck and a four-engine configuration that add speed, but also the option to conserve fuel on shorter runs. KARL is painted in all caps on the side of the ferry.
Taking Chronicle journalists on a run through the Napa River into San Pablo Bay, veteran captain Chris San Miguel used the name frequently during radio chatter with the Coast Guard and other boats. ('Karl copies, thank you.')
'It's going to take a little while to get used to it,' San Miguel said, laughing.
Adding to the confusion: Karl will likely be a regular on the Vallejo run, where there's a regular deckhand named Carl.
San Miguel started in 1989 as an engineer on the Bay Breeze, now the fleet's oldest boat that is overdue for retirement. He says Karl's controls are 'just plain smoother,' moving laterally with jets of water instead of propellers and a rudder.
The inside is sleek and white, looking more like a sterile 'Star Trek' spaceship corridor than the grimier 1980s and 1990s ferries still in the system. The prime spot for passengers may be the back of the top deck, where bar-style seats surround an elevated table like a lounge on a cruise ship; part of the ferry system's shifting functions which include things like shuttles to Giants games and special scenic Fleet Week runs.
'It works wonderfully for a commute and it will work wonderfully for those summer days, when people don't have a destination in mind and want to hang out on the water,' Hall said. 'It's a commuter boat and a party boat all in one.'
But there's always a younger, faster, cleaner boat coming into town. Next after Karl and Zalophus are three battery-powered ferries holding 150 passengers each, set to arrive in 2027. They'll shuttle riders on the system's shortest routes from the Ferry Building, including Treasure Island and Mission Bay. Battery-powered boats with room for 450 passengers are coming in 2028.
Until then, Karl the boat will rule local waterways.
'Once you know the history,' Captain San Miguel said, 'it fits the bay.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
27-07-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
This is San Francisco's widest sidewalk — by a lot
In a far corner of the sleepy Outer Richmond neighborhood in San Francisco, just blocks away from Lands End, a city oddity emerges — a 37-foot wide sidewalk. The stretch of pavement on Point Lobos Avenue is the widest in the city, nearly three times the size of the average residential sidewalk, according to a Chronicle analysis of sidewalk data from the city. That data has some limitations: Entire neighborhoods like Mission Bay and the Presidio weren't counted, and many street segments in the eastern half of the city are missing. Still, the Point Lobos Avenue sidewalk stands out even in a neighborhood with relatively wide sidewalks overall — it's large enough to easily walk five people abreast and still have room for passersby walking the other way. The residential buildings along the blocks, many of them built in the 1920s, offer plenty of room for cars to park in their driveways and still not come even close to encroaching on pedestrian space. It's almost large enough to park a standard size Muni bus. So how did that extraordinarily wide sidewalk come to be? It wasn't a masterplanned design choice or an experiment to increase pedestrian space. Instead, said Woody LaBounty, the president and CEO of SF Heritage, it was simply 'a quirk of maps.' In the early 1860s, long before the Richmond District as we know it came to be, Point Lobos Avenue, which began at what is now the intersection of Geary Boulevard and Presidio Avenue and ran towards the beach, was a privately owned toll road. It was a thoroughfare for people living in the then-developed eastern parts of the city to get to the beach, where they'd visit the Cliff House, said LaBounty, who is also the co-founder of history nonprofit the Western Neighborhoods Project. The road largely tracked in a straight line on what is now Geary, before veering northward at the tail end in order to avoid a hill, he said. When it was completed, Point Lobos Avenue was 110 feet wide, designed for horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses, according to the National Park Service, and a favorite racing road for horse drivers. But it was after that that the city was granted all the land on the west side of the Peninsula as part of the Outside Lands Agreement in 1866. With that, the city planned the grid system of streets over the sand dunes of the west side and got to developing. But the existing Point Lobos Avenue complicated that plan: Because the road ticked northward at the end, it didn't fit neatly into the grid, instead slicing through the neat rectangular lots, LaBounty explained. When property owners started developing those lots, they could only build up to their property lines, which were set far back due to the width of what was once the diagonal portion of the toll road. So, instead of leaving a 110 foot wide thoroughfare in the middle of a city block, the city just filled in the difference with sidewalks, LaBounty explained. Today, as people amble down Point Lobos Ave towards the beach, it's not hard to imagine a time when horse-drawn carriages ruled the road in the somewhat haphazard patchwork of shapes that make up the almost absurdly wide walkway. Though it's the widest residential sidewalk, Point Lobos Ave is not the only place in the city to take a very expansive stroll. Several other sidewalks throughout the city are 30 feet wide, and even more are at least 25 feet. On the other end of the spectrum, some residential sidewalks are as narrow as 3 or 4 feet wide, according to city data.
Chicago Tribune
19-07-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Volunteers give Portage's Prairie Duneland Trail foliage a trim
Workers from Thieneman Construction and Commonwealth Engineers took a break Friday from working on projects at Portage's wastewater treatment plant to attack overgrown vegetation along the Prairie Duneland Trail. 'It was a little daunting,' said Mark Hall, north office area manager with Thieneman, when he and Park Superintendent Kelly Smith drove down the trail a month ago to gauge the scope of the work. But about 50 volunteers tackled the project, trimming branches along about two miles of the trail. 'One of the guys brought a battery-powered chainsaw' and several batteries to swap out during the day, Hall said. He used a gas-powered hedge trimmer on smaller branches while Andrew Kreps used a gas-powered pole saw. Hall's son, Matt Hall, drove a skid steer to gather branches so they could be loaded into a dump truck to be hauled away. 'At one time, we had three or four dump trucks running,' Mark said. 'Our company is big into volunteering,' said Dave Kreps, taking a short break from loading branches onto the skid steer and mashing them down so Matt could see where he was going. 'I've done this trail once from Chesterton to Hobart,' riding a bike alongside his wife, Kreps said. That sounds like a long ride, but it was even longer because he had to return to the car in Chesterton after getting to Hobart. 'With a big bike ride like this, we get a big Dairy Queen treat,' he said. At Portage's wastewater treatment plant, Kreps is helping install new equipment. The city's crew there are 'the best people I've ever worked with,' he said. Utilities Superintendent Tracie Marshall returned the compliment. 'They're like family,' she said. 'They came and did the work. If there was a problem, they came and told me when it was fixed.' The city is on a long-overdue spending spree for its wastewater treatment system, spending $14 million on new clarifiers and a solar array at the plant and $31 million this year on a north side interceptor – think of it as a giant artery transporting wastewater to the heart of the system, the treatment plant – along with lift stations in the field and an ultraviolet treatment system at the plant. 'We do a lot of work with Portage,' Mark Hall said, so the company wanted to find a way to give back to the city. Gabrielle Taber, Commonwealth's director of Indiana business development operations, said her company feels the same way. 'We picked a very good day to do this,' with a break from the hotter weather earlier this month, she said. 'It was a great turnout. It really was,' Taber said, allowing the volunteers to finish a couple of hours early. Along with Thieneman and Commonwealth, the city had crews from the treatment plant, field services and park department there. Portage Township Trustee Brendan Clancy sent workers and equipment after seeing a call for volunteers posted. Marshall and Smith worked together to come up with the trail cleanup project. 'We're overworked,' Smith said. 'We have five full-time employees. We have 19 parks.' 'We will never turn away help,' she said of volunteers offering their service to the parks. 'There's never a lack of things to do.' Figuring 50 working putting in six hours Friday, that's 300 hours of volunteer work, 'a value right under $10,000,' not counting the equipment they brought, Smith said. 'A lot of time our work is reactive because we are so small,' she said. After receiving calls about the need to trim vegetation along the trail, she knew this was the right project for Thieneman and Commonwealth. 'We're overwhelmed with gratitude. Truly,' Smith said.
San Francisco Chronicle
14-07-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
We're expanding our coverage of aging in the Bay Area
The Chronicle launched a series today about what may become the most important force to shape life in the U.S. in the years ahead. It's not an issue that you've seen scrawled across headlines and social media, like crime, homelessness, immigration or artificial intelligence (though it intersects with some of those). The 'doom loop'? No. Well, not the one you're likely thinking of, anyway. America is getting older fast, and experts say the rapid-aging trend is about to shift into overdrive. The ramifications of older demographics will rip through every part of society, placing unprecedented demands on housing, health care, education and social services. As explained in the story we published today, this trend could be particularly pronounced in the Bay Area. 'Fueled by a pandemic-spurred exodus of young people and laws that motivate homeowners to stay, the region has aged faster over the past half-decade than any other major metro area,' write data editor Dan Kopf and reporter Roland Li. The series was born when conversations in our newsroom about how the Bay Area was changing couldn't escape the gravity of this region's aging data. When Kopf and Transformation Editor Robert Morast would meet to forecast the future of San Francisco and the region, they kept returning to this massive demographic shift. It's been happening slowly, over decades, almost unnoticed, then accelerated during the pandemic, as many younger workers and families migrated out of the region. Seen as a whole, it pointed to undeniable effects on the region's economy, housing and cultural systems. And those changes aren't just happening here. The Bay Area may be the first crest of a massive wave that's about to wash over the entire nation. In one neighborhood where the median age is 55, homeowners distilled their outlook on their homes to the same six words: 'Carry me out in a coffin.' But some report the once-vibrant area is now sleepy, less diverse, a shadow of its former self. And it faces hard questions about the local economy and what comes next. (To read our story about this neighborhood as soon as it publishes, check out our Morning Fix newsletter on Tuesday.) We'll be publishing a new story every day this week on the aging of the Bay Area. Today, we're jumping into the data that shows what areas in the region have aged the most and how San Francisco stacks up against other major cities. There's lots more to come. And our coverage won't stop there: Two reporters in our newsroom, Erin Allday and Catherine Ho, have already begun covering not only the impacts of this demographic shift, but also issues that we hope will be especially relevant for an aging population. Allday and Ho are both longtime reporters on the health beat at the Chronicle, writing about everything from research at the Bay Area's cutting-edge medical institutions and biotech companies to government policy to medical industry news to practical health and wellness tips. They plan to leverage their experience and sourcing to provide comprehensive coverage on aging in our region. We hope you'll keep following this important topic with us, and let us know what you'd like to see. You can track all of our coverage here.
