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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 36: Ferry Tales - One of America's Oldest Forms of Transit
From the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, this episode discusses the indispensable role of ferries in linking communities across the United States. Learn about federal support for ferry services, the vital subsidies they require, and the inventive ways various states are enhancing their ferry networks.
On this episode we hit the high seas, the low seas, lakes, rivers and, well, all the water in between. How did ferries get their start in the US and how important are they today? All of this and more on Transit Tangents. Hey everybody, and welcome back to Transit Tangents. My name is Chris and I'm Lewis, and today we are diving into a transit service that may not be the most popular in the US. You don't see it in a lot of places unless you live near large bodies of water. But what is that?
Speaker 1:transit service Lewis. It is ferries. And speaking of diving in, if your ferry is working properly, hopefully you are not diving into the water that the ferry is going across.
Speaker 2:Ideally not, not the fairies going across?
Speaker 1:Ideally not, anyway. Fairies, though, have obviously evolved over the years, but they've been around as a form of transportation literally since the dawn of civilization. Some of the earliest examples of fairies were all the way back in Greek mythology. We looked up the correct pronunciation here, but Charon Charon, charon Charon Looks like Sharon to me. It looks like Sharon Charon who was transporting souls across the River Styx. So deep history here.
Speaker 2:And we mentioned that in a previous episode. Actually, on the tolling episode, we mentioned how tolling goes back to antiquity and we talked about paying a toll to cross the River Styx. Really, you were paying for a ferry service to cross the river Styx.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is, when you said it at the time it kind of went over my head and I did not know the story and now I know a little bit more of it. I just kind of let it go at the time.
Speaker 2:You didn't take Greek mythology in high school.
Speaker 1:I definitely had some Greek mythology in high school, but I don't remember this one, or maybe I wasn't paying attention, which is a miss on my part, because I could have have learned about the early use of ferries, but all right.
Speaker 2:So today we're talking about ferries. As you've watched our series, you know we sort of hit different modes of transportation. We've talked about monorails, we've talked about Amtrak, we've talked about road building across the US, we've talked about gondolas our favorite topic and we've talked about e-bikes for the cult of the e-bike. So today we want to dive into something that's a little new, and that is the ferries. But, as Lewis was saying, ferries go back to antiquity. There is evidence of ferries being used in ancient Egypt to cross the river Nile. There are ferries that go back into Greek times. In Roman times, you know, the Romans expanded their empire and there were many rivers in the way, and the best way to cross those rivers in a lot of cases is you had to have some type of floating mechanism to get troops from one side to the other. Right?
Speaker 1:And obviously there's a whole bunch of like pros and cons when you're deciding whether or not to use a ferry back then or even now, because obviously you know the Romans knew how to build a bridge, just like we know how to build a bridge. But it's kind of an interesting trade off when you're sort of doing these sorts of things right. So the nice thing about a ferry is, in the very beginning you've got like a low construction costs. If you've got a boat, you really just need a place for people to get on and off on either side, so docks basically, and you can basically be set up and running with your boat ready to go back and forth all day, whereas with a bridge it's going to take a lot of time to build the bridge initially. It's going to take a lot of resources, time, labor, all these sorts of things to get the project off the ground in the first place. But the nice thing is is, once it's there, it's there and, generally speaking, you're going to have a low operating cost once it's there and set up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and speaking of low operating costs, the earliest ferries were really just logs strung together as a raft and you would use poles and the poles were to. You know, you'd use poles to push yourself across the shallow part of the river.
Speaker 1:Probably the cheapest ferry in existence.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, Although back then I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Inflation now. So fast forward to the more modern era, although back then I don't know. Yeah, inflation now, who knows? So fast forward to the more modern era. We are looking at colonial America. When we were setting up the colonies in the US there were a lot of rivers along the coast and it would take a long time to take a horse all the way upstream to find a shallow enough area to cross. So ferries became crucial to the early colonies, especially the New York area where we saw some of the earliest ferries introduced in the US.
Speaker 1:Right, and you know what we'll get into New York today a little bit later on. But obviously you know you've got Manhattan being a big island, you've got people looking to leave Manhattan in any direction and the easiest way to do it until you had some of the big bridges that we now see today was going to be some early examples of ferries in the US. We also had the Rocky Hill Glastonbury Ferry over in Connecticut. This ferry went back as early as 1655, which is, I mean, before the birth of the country, which is impressive.
Speaker 2:Yes, that was before the birth of the country. Before the birth of the country, which is impressive. Yes, that is before the birth of the country. And before that, though, in New York, it was 1637, when you had the first ferry line operating between Brooklyn and Manhattan. So the history of ferries in the US go back further than just about any other type of transportation, right, with the exception of bringing ships over, or maybe roads. With the exception of bringing ships over, or maybe roads.
Speaker 1:As the technology began to evolve, though, we started to see the introduction of steam-powered ferries, and I had a fun fact that I shared with Chris before this. I had to do a project on presidents when I was in like fourth or fifth grade, and I had James Madison and James Madison. Sorry, no, not James Madison, James Monroe.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:James Monroe was the first president to ride a steamboat, so fun fact there. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:So fast forward. Again we're looking at the ferries. To this point, most of the ferries in service were for pedestrians. Maybe you brought your horse on board. You were definitely carrying goods back and forth from one shore to the other. But when we think about a modern ferry, in my mind I think of a vehicle driving on and off of the ferry. And we really started to see those take off in Scotland in the 1850s with the first roll-on roll-off ferry, or, as they're called in the industry, the row-row ferries.
Speaker 1:That's fun, I guess. Row, row, row your boat, all right, All right. Before the technology surrounding ferries really began to took off, we mentioned steam ferries already. Obviously, the earliest versions that Chris mentioned before were using a pole to kind of push yourself across. One of the other early forms was the cable ferry, which actually had a cable kind of running along the bottom of the body of water and the ferry would have a mechanism using and kind of like pulling the cable to get yourself from one side to the other, which is uh. At first, when I first read it, I was like this sounds scary, uh, like that, like there's you know it's gonna be a cable running across, but this sounds like it would be below the water, below the surface, so that you're not seeing this happening. But this was the actual methodology from getting you from one side to the other and I was actually reading up on this.
Speaker 2:This apparently was most common in swiftly moving bodies of water. So if you had a, if you had a river that was moving quickly, you would lay a cable across and pull yourself via the cable so that your boat didn't get swept down Right.
Speaker 1:It also would probably be much more efficient like pulling wise also, versus trying to like fight the current the whole time. If you've got the cable, there Makes some sense. But as we kind of know now there's a lot more technology that is much easier to use and much likely safer than using that as well to kind of get there and that's kind of. As we move forward, we did see the advent of all sorts of different ferries, ranging from hydrofoils and hovercrafts, which at one point were kind of like monorails, which was a recent episode we just did. It was the technology of the future. We're going to be on these hovercrafts skirting across the water.
Speaker 2:There are so many videos, a lot of Soviet videos from like the 70s, 80s of them testing hovercrafts, huge hovercrafts, where you know you would see the boat going across the water and then it would just pop up on the land and park. Basically, when's the last time you saw a hovercraft?
Speaker 1:The only thing that I can think of that looks like a miniature version of it is the little bumper boats in Roller Coaster Tycoon. It was like bumper cars but bumper boats and they're in these little floating things. But yeah, I've never even.
Speaker 2:And I was thinking of an N64 game called Diddy Kong Racing where you get to race little hovercrafts Really unruly. But yeah, I think the hovercraft really failed because it takes a lot of energy to push the air down and have the hovercraft float and just at the end of the day it was not an economical solution for ferry service and hydrofoils we do see in like sailing, and obviously now there are like the actual little like surfboard kind of things that are hydrofoils, but they never really took off as far as like widespread use, uh, for ferries.
Speaker 1:But as we kind of move forward, though, there were a lot more that have taken off and are widely used today, uh, the first of which is a catamaran ferry yeah, catamaran ferries are incredibly stable.
Speaker 2:Obviously, if you don't, if you're not familiar with a catamaran, is it is? It is a double-hulled ship where you have it's kind of the shape of a. It looks like a staple you take it out of the water.
Speaker 2:It's the shape of a staple where you have the two pontoons in the water and the platform on top. I had some experience of watching one of these get built in Mobile, my hometown. It's a big shipbuilding city and I used used to go, especially after I had a car. I would drive downtown any excuse. I had to go and walk along the river and just be in downtown. I grew up in a very rural area, so feeling like I was in a city was it was a big draw.
Speaker 1:The big city the big city of.
Speaker 2:Mobile, alabama, so I would go to the river and right across the river was Austal Shipbuilding, which is a an Australian shipbuilder, and they got a contract to build the Hawaii Superferry in Mobile, which was this massive catamaran ferry and you could see it through the doors. They'd always have the doors open and you could see them building it and taking shape and I remember going out there after it launched and seeing it in the water and it was so cool to look at. So they got the ferries to hawaii, originally to move the, the ship to move passengers between oahu and maui, and I think it operated for a year before they went bankrupt.
Speaker 1:So I also know that it's like it was a fairly controversial thing, I think, in hawaii like very controversial. Uh, my partner's family is. They all lived in hawaii for years and years and I know that ferry service in that area was always controversial because of whales. There was conflict between whales and ferries, which is not something I would think of Conflict between whales and ferries. Oh God. That's the thumbnail for the video.
Speaker 2:There's all these stories about orcas taking down yachts.
Speaker 1:I also have experience with a very similar catamaran, though, uh, to what you've described here. So, growing up in rochester, new york, uh, it was a sad few years uh, because it the city of rochester, built up this beautiful ferry terminal to launch the fast ferry between rochester, new york and toronto. Uh, conveniently for me and my parents at the time, my mom and my stepdad lived in rochester and my dad and my stepmom lived in toronto. So little 10, 11, 12 year old lewis would uh pop onto the fast ferry. My mom would drop me off on one side, uh, and my dad would pick me up on the other side, and I would have a ferry service to take me back and forth between my parents.
Speaker 1:And it was a really nice boat actually that had to be really cool as a 10 year old it was so cool and, like they, I got like extra privileges because I was an unaccompanied minor um and this was a. It was like a two and a half hour ferry ride probably, which only shaved off a little bit from the drive, but it was much more comfortable obviously and the lake's wide enough that it feels like you're on the ocean, because you can't see land.
Speaker 2:Once you're in the middle, in the middle of lake ontario, yeah, you can't see land, yep um yeah, it was.
Speaker 1:It was very cool. I mean it had a movie theater, there were like restaurants you could drive your car on. I never, never did that because I was 10. But yeah um, but yeah, it was such a cool experience to be able to do. Unfortunately, uh went bankrupt once.
Speaker 2:Then the city of rochester bailed it out and then it lost a lot of money again I imagine a lot of the traffic was going to toronto, but not not from toronto back to.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately. Yes, you'd be correct in assuming that Rochester's doing a lot of great things right now, but especially at the time when it came out, it was not ideal. That's fair yeah.
Speaker 2:And Toronto also, a city that uses ferries for a little bit of travel, not a ton, but I think the most ferries they have. It goes between Toronto and Toronto Island, which if you haven't been in Toronto they have. It goes between Toronto and Toronto Island, which if you haven't been in Toronto. Toronto Island is beautiful. There's no cars on the island. There's a couple of people who live there, but there's also this amusement park and if you go in the winter, the amusement park is abandoned. So you just get to go and walk around this empty amusement park and then walk out to the little beach and it's beautiful. So take the ferry in Toronto.
Speaker 1:One more really interesting kind of piece of technology surrounding ferries and this is pretty niche, but one example I know of this is a train ferry that actually connects into the train Italia system. In Italy, you can be on a train, go to the southern tip of Italy I forget specifically which city it's in and your train will literally a couple of the cars will go onto the ferry, will literally a couple of the cars will go on to the ferry. Then the ferry, okay, continues over on the water to sicily, where it continues to drive off of the ferry onto sicily that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:I, when I was envisioning a train, ferry, I was envisioning like, uh, cargo train, cargo freight. No, I didn't, I didn't imagine you sitting in your, your, the, your car train, your, uh, your passenger train and then being on the ferry.
Speaker 1:You had pulled it on here, and I actually just saw something on Twitter the other day where somebody was like yeah, it was really interesting. I assumed I was going to have to get off of the train onto a ferry and then on a train again on the other side, and they were hanging out and not paying attention on the train which you can do on the train because you're just hanging out and all of a sudden they were on a boat.
Speaker 1:That's in the train uh, yeah, I'll make sure we pull an image for those of you watching, but if you're listening, I think we've painted a pretty good picture of what it is.
Speaker 2:You've had experience with it.
Speaker 1:Reach out yes, yeah, I want to hear about it. That sounds awesome. Yeah, or we?
Speaker 2:can just go to italy yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, let's, let's. We're gonna jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video, go ahead and do so. Also, leave a comment. We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out.
Speaker 2:Please share this with your friends, and if you don't have time to watch YouTube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there. Just be sure to leave us a rating and give us a comment. So, as we said at the beginning, you may not have direct experience with a ferry. I was lucky enough to live on the coast, so there was a small ferry that would take you between Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines in Alabama. There's several along the Gulf Coast like this, but primarily you're going to see ferries in places like New York and San Francisco, washington State, alaska, north Carolina and around the Great Lakes. And why is that? Well, ferries obviously need water to operate and ferries make the most sense in places where maybe a bridge doesn't make the most economical sense, but you still need to connect communities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to that point, there was actually a really interesting video that just came out this week, so within a week or two of when you're you're watching this um by the youtube channel. Half is interesting, um, and it was specifically about, uh, fairies in the pharaoh islands. And the pharaoh islands are like a pretty uh, the opposite of densely populated. They're not a densely populated area, it's very mountainous region and they sorry I had what is that? What would I say? Lightly populated, sparsely. Yes, the faroe islands are a very sparsely populated part of the world.
Speaker 2:Uh, sparsely also known as anti-densely populated densely.
Speaker 1:Uh, it's a series of islands with kind of steep mountains and whatnot, on them, a couple small cities, but we're talking. Some of these islands have less than a thousand people on them and they have traditionally had ferries kind of connecting them all together. And this video did a really good job explaining how they're actually replacing some of the ferries with tunnels and that they were able to make make it make financial sense to build these tunnels in this area. Uh, because of the high operating cost of a ferry when it's, you know, you've got to have multiple crew members going back and forth all day uh, they're dealing with all sorts of weather and whatnot.
Speaker 1:Um, the faroe islands have a much cheaper way to build tunnels, it seems, and it likely probably has to do with the lack of population. You're not needing to like buy up property and navigate all sorts of utilities and all this sort of stuff. But there's a really interesting video. I won't get into all of it but we will link it for folks if you want to watch it uh, the elon musk boring company popped in my head, but surely not.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, I don't think that they're using that. I don't know. Maybe we could do an entire episode on the cost of tunneling and why that makes transit projects so expensive. But the us, I think, has the fourth most expensive tunneling uh cost in the world. Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. So I'd be really curious to know how they do it in the faroe islands and they'd be curious to know why it's so expensive here.
Speaker 1:And I mean, yeah, we'll save it for that. If you want that episode, let us know.
Speaker 2:Let's go to the faroe islands and uh and experiment if you were coming up very if you were from the faroe islands department of transportation and would like to pay for a trip for us to visit.
Speaker 1:We would love to learn about your tunneling projects yeah, yeah, I was gonna say otherwise it'd be a very expensive episode we're promising italy and uh yeah so obviously ferries are vital to the transportation infrastructure for many communities across the country.
Speaker 2:To reflect that, the US federal government has prioritized ferries, in a sense, in our budgeting mechanisms. So really what we need is Secretary Pete Buttigieg to come on and explain to us how the US DOT supports ferry service around the country. So, secretary Pete, open invitation, come on. But the federal government does support fer service around the country.
Speaker 1:So Secretary of State.
Speaker 2:Open invitation Come on, but the federal government does support ferries around the country, and what we've learned with ferry service, similar to most other types of transit, is that they are not always profitable, so they do rely heavily on some type of subsidy, usually from state or federal government.
Speaker 1:And, as we've said before, to be clear, they don't need to be profitable. It is like we're providing a service in a lot of cases. If it's profitable, great, if not, that's fine.
Speaker 2:This is a vital piece of infrastructure so we have to support it to support these communities. But again, that can be an entirely different episode. But the federal government in the Federal Highway 8 Act did allow for some federal funding to be used for ferry service. In a lot of cases this was just used for the approach to the ferries, so to make better connections between the highways and the ferry docks. Over time that gets amended and eventually more money is allowed for rebuilding ferry terminals and providing maintenance for the ferries. And then we get all the way to 1991, where another amendment allows for federal highway funds to be taken out of the Federal Highway Trust to be used for actually purchasing new ferries and maintaining these fleets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and essentially it seems like the application here is treating the ferry as an extension of the highway that it's on. So it's probably like a wording mechanism throughout the whole thing to just be like yep, the ferry is the highway, it's part of the highway that it's on. Yeah, um, so it's like a probably like a wording mechanism throughout the whole thing to just be like yep, the ferry is the highway, it's part of the highway, it's part of how cars are getting from one side to the other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, in fact, at the on the usdot's website where they talk about ferry service in the us and give a history of it, uh, I think the title that article is where the highway meets the. Where the highway meets the. Where the highway when the road. Where the water meets the road.
Speaker 1:Where the water meets the road. Yeah yeah, I actually made the joke to Chris before we got started. Here, too, we need to find a way to convince the federal government to recognize train lines that run along highways to be part of the highway, so that we can allocate some of the funding from there there, because in a state like texas, it's literally in the texas constitution that 97 percent of the budget for transportation needs to be spent on roads.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we need something like where the rails meet the road yes, where the rails meet the road.
Speaker 1:Very interesting though, that they were able to like finesse the ferry funding into the Highway Trust Fund Absolutely, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is where we were talking about why ferry service is so critical for communities. We look at places like New York and Seattle and San Francisco, where obviously there is still a car culture, there's other types of public transit which has made ferries not obsolete but has definitely eaten into their total number of passengers on a yearly basis. But a lot of these communities ferry service is actually sort of on the rise, especially specific lines, because with more and more cars on the road, you're creating all this congestion and now people are looking at ferries as a reasonable alternative to getting from point a to point b speaking of places like that, uh, staten island, the staten island ferry is the busiest single ferry in the world uh, carrying 23.9 million annual passengers, which is crazy numbers, obviously it's.
Speaker 2:We'll pull some more stats on this a little bit later in the episode, but the satin island ferry has more passengers per year on this single line than some of the largest ferry systems where there's multiple boats and multiple lines has more passengers than some of the largest ferry systems in the world. It's crazy, yeah. And obviously this serves as a vital connection between Staten Island and Manhattan, not only for commuters to get back and forth. I mean it's free, so that's a big benefit. It's also great for tourists. So if you're trying to get the best view, I mean it's free, so that's a big benefit, it's also great for tourists. So if you're trying to get the best view of the Statue of Liberty, you either have to take the boat to the Statue of Liberty or you hop on the Staten Island Ferry because it's kind of the closest you're going to get to it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and New York City beyond the Staten Island Ferry. Obviously, we've mentioned several other ferries they have, but they've actually expanded their ferry system, uh, as recently as 2017, connecting different neighborhoods like the lower east side, astoria and rockaway with manhattan. Um, actually, I have a friend who lives in astoria and in 2019 I was able to take the ferry from that area over to manhattan, which is pretty cool and like very seamless, quick, easy, um and, like you said, kind of like nice views. You're outside, you know like the subway is great and all, but you can be on a boat on a nice day going across. That's a nice alternative to have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And with those expansions New York has the largest ferry fleet in the US, which is also very impressive. However, they don't go the furthest distance. If we talk about communities in the US that rely on ferry service, where they go super long distances, we have to look at Alaska, where we have the Alaska Maritime Highway. Now this is a series of ferries that can take you from Washington State all the way up to Alaska and then sort of follows the coast around Alaska and into part of the Aleutians and you can load your car on there, but it carries around 350,000 passengers a year and about 100,000 vehicles. I did do a little bit of research on the ferry service going from Bellingham, washington to Ketchikan, I believe, is how it's pronounced. That ferry service, which is sort of the first stop in Alaska, takes 36 hours.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's longer than I would have thought. It's a long ferry, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was reading about somebody's experience on it and they had a stateroom, so I priced staterooms. The cost of the ferry alone is already around $400 to take it, and this probably changes by season. To then add a stateroom, it was another $400. This was a stateroom with bunk beds and facilities, so you can get staterooms without facilities and all that. But we're looking at an 800 ticket to take the ferry for 36 hours from bellingham to uh ketchikan. Uh, now, I did read online. There are apparently places where you can set up camp on the boat, so people actually bring tents and set them up in different areas on the ferry which is kind of impressive.
Speaker 2:So maybe we'll take a ferry to. I don't want to take a 36 hour ferry. No, I think I'm okay on that if somebody else has.
Speaker 1:I don't want to take a 36-hour ferry.
Speaker 2:No, I think I'm okay on that one If somebody else has done it and they want to share some videos with us. Please, by all means, share the videos, Absolutely. It sounds very cold.
Speaker 1:Obviously, there are a ton of different systems throughout the country that we haven't touched on yet. You've got the Outer Banks in North Carolina.
Speaker 2:You've got the Washington, washington State Ferry Service that's operated by WatchDot, which is the largest ferry service in the country by destinations and system size.
Speaker 1:One more actually that I had experience on this summer. Off the coast of Portland Maine you have the Casco Bay Ferry Lines, which connect a bunch of islands that don't have any other way to get there. So these systems exist all across the country. There's a lot of fun specific episodes that we definitely want to do on them in the future, but this is kind of the broad overview and you don't have to go to the coast necessarily to see them.
Speaker 2:There are also inland ferries in the US. There's probably still a couple that cross the Mississippi, but ones I know of for sure are the Cumberland City Ferry in Tennessee, which is very small, only about 4,000 vehicles per month across this river. And then you have even smaller ones where you have the Valley View Ferry in Kentucky. So some of these ferries that are crossing the inland waterways can only fit four to eight vehicles. There's some pretty wild photos that we'll have to include in here as well.
Speaker 1:So how important are ferries in the United States?
Speaker 2:Well, we have some stats for you.
Speaker 1:First up, there are a total of 190 ferry operators across the country, which provide scheduled service and of those 190 operators, they see 106 million trips annually, which is crazy to think there's that many people riding ferries every day.
Speaker 2:These service 37 states and three US territories, as well as the systems.
Speaker 1:They include over 500 terminals, so a lot of infrastructure to maintain 500 terminals and almost 700 vessels, almost 700 actual ferry boats across the systems.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and those ferry boats vary widely. They can carry up to 6,000 passengers and some of them go down to about two passengers Right.
Speaker 1:Some of them even just carry bikes. There's a bike ferry in.
Speaker 2:Vermont, oh yeah we should go to Vermont.
Speaker 1:Inland bike ferry.
Speaker 2:The services span over 7,800 nautical miles and for those who want a conversion, that is over 14,500 kilometers. Wow, that's a lot.
Speaker 1:And I would imagine a lot of the distances are covered in Alaska, it seems like, but there's also, you know, high concentrations of these in our major metropolitan areas across the United States with the bulk of those ferries being found in New York City.
Speaker 1:Cool, all right, with all that being said, that is our overview of fairies. I think that we accidentally committed to like 10 additional episodes in that one. But uh and and, as chris kind of mentioned at the start of this, we've kind of done overviews of so many different systems at this point and I think our focus, moving forward in a lot of these now is going to have more specific focus now on different systems and different cities and get more specific moving forward now that we have the kind of broad overviews of so many of these different systems. I'm sure we've left out, left out some sort of system here that we'll add to.
Speaker 2:And if you, if you have ideas for broad overviews or you just want a history of a certain system, you want us to dive into it, please put those in the comments. We do read them totally.
Speaker 1:Uh, we absolutely will take suggestions on episode topics yeah, so uh, with all that being said, thank you all so much for watching. We super appreciate it and, with that, enjoy the rest of your transit future. Note to us editing this make that look better.