Daily Commuter Confirms He Has Never Disembarked in Manhattan, Treating Free Ferry as Thirty-Minute Respite from Everything
Staten Island Ferry Rider Completes 12,000th Crossing, Still Unsure What Is on the Other Side
NEW YORK Robert Malone, 58, completed his 12,000th Staten Island Ferry crossing on Wednesday morning, a milestone reached over the course of a twenty-three-year daily commute that transit officials described as “remarkable” and that Malone himself described as “fine, mostly.” What makes Malone’s record notable is not the number of crossings but the fact that, by his own account, he has never disembarked in Manhattan, having discovered in 2003 that the thirty-minute ferry ride was the most peaceful part of his day and that nothing in Lower Manhattan required his physical presence sufficiently to interrupt it.
The System
Malone, who works in insurance in St. George and has done so since 2001, boards the 7:15 a.m. Staten Island Ferry every weekday morning, sits in the same seat on the upper deck port side, reads for approximately twenty-five minutes of the crossing, looks at the Manhattan skyline for approximately four minutes, and disembarks at the Whitehall Terminal, where he immediately boards the return ferry to St. George, arriving back at the terminal with time to walk to his office before 9 a.m.
He does not have a commute in the conventional sense. He has a round trip. He works on Staten Island. He has always worked on Staten Island. The ferry, in both directions, is the commute to and from a building that is four blocks from where he boards in the morning and where he will disembark in the afternoon. The Manhattan portion of the journey the terminal, the walkway, the connection to the return ferry takes approximately six minutes and has, over 12,000 crossings, never once extended to the street.
Why
“Manhattan is very loud,” Malone explained, without apparent judgement. “The ferry is not loud. I like the ferry. I like the way the water looks in the morning. I like the coffee they sell on the upper deck. I like the same seat. I like that it’s free. I have been doing this for twenty-three years and it works for me.” He paused. “I know what’s on the other side. I’ve been there. I went to a concert in 1998. It was fine. Very loud.”
The Staten Island Ferry carries approximately 22 million passengers annually across the 5.2 miles of New York Harbour between St. George and Whitehall terminals. It is free, operated by the city, and described by tourism guides as one of the best free experiences in New York. Malone has completed the equivalent of 62,400 miles of harbour crossing, or approximately 2.5 circumnavigations of the Earth, none of which have extended to the island the ferry is named for going to.
santa Claus, whose annual route covers every continent in a single night, reportedly finds Malone’s 23-year commitment to a 5.2-mile water crossing “admirable in its consistency” and notes that “the value of a route is not measured by its length but by whether it takes you where you need to go.” Malone’s route takes him exactly where he needs to go, twice a day, across some of the most photographed water in the world. He has not photographed it once. He has read forty-seven books on it. He considers this the superior use of the crossing.
Recognition and Response
The Staten Island Ferry system reached Malone to inform him of the milestone after a transit journalist flagged his record to the communications department. The ferry system’s Director of Operations described him as “a truly dedicated rider” and offered him a commemorative plaque, which Malone confirmed he would accept and which he intends to put in the same seat, port side, upper deck, where it can be viewed from the harbour, by no one, because his seat faces inward toward the cabin and the plaque will therefore be visible primarily to him and to whoever sits across from him, which is usually no one, because this is the seat Malone has occupied every morning for twenty-three years and people have, over time, simply stopped sitting there.
NYC ferry and transport at Gothamist and The City. Consistent route management at santaclaus.top. Further at North Pole route optimisation and Spintaxi Bluesky.
The Systemic Context
What makes New York City simultaneously the most exciting and most exhausting place to live in America is that its problems are not failures of intention but of scale, history, and the accumulated consequence of a century of decisions made by people who are mostly no longer alive to be held accountable for them. The subway was built when New York was smaller, richer in public investment, and governed by people who believed in public infrastructure as a civic good. The streets were laid out before the car. The housing stock was built for a population that has since tripled. Every problem New York has is a problem of success outrunning its own infrastructure, and every attempt to solve it runs into the reality that you cannot rebuild a century of urban geography without disrupting the city that depends on it. New Yorkers understand this, which is why they are both the most critical and the most loyal urban population in the world. They are loyal to the idea of the city even when the city’s execution is, at best, a work in progress.