City eyes more water taxi options to ease burden on ferry service

How to deal with the travel bottlenecks and long ferry lines between the City and the islands has been hotly debated for years.

Earlier this summer, videos posted to social media showed long lineups for the ferry to the Toronto Islands snaking around the corner and down the street around the Westin Hotel.

At the most recent Toronto City Council meeting in December, a motion was tabled by Mayor Olivia Chow to explore the possibility of issuing more licenses to water taxi services offering travel between the waterfront and Toronto Island Park.

Mary Partridge has been going to the islands since the 1980s and has lived there since the 1990s. She’s in favour of expanding water taxi services.

“Absolutely,” she tells The Leader Spirit. “We need options to the ferries because sometimes they are just too, too full.”

According to the city, five operators with a total of 53 boats were granted licences to dock at Toronto Island Park locations. However, with the growth in demand for water taxi services, the authority to grant licenses has exceeded Parks, Forestry and Recreation’s delegated authority to issue them. The motion calls for licenses to be issued to qualified operators for the next five years.

“Even if we do add more boats it’s still going to create some sort of bottleneck,” said Alex Ferris, co-owner and manager of Tiki Taxi.

Ferris says over the last five years travel has exploded compared to 10 years ago adding the conversation is a great start but warns infrastructure on the island side is already causing bottlenecks and simply adding more boats might not help.

“If we do add another 10 boats, it just adds another 10 boats in line on those really busy days. There’s still only eight docks, eight spots on the island side.”

Ferris is optimistic, telling The Leader Spirit the City has been signalling to him that they are willing to seriously discuss some of the issues.

Tim Kocur, the director of the Waterfront BIA, says he’s also been hearing from other taxi services that demand to cross has been on the rise. In 2023, the BIA says water taxis transported more than 486,000 passengers.

Kocur says there is some long-term vision for addressing the backlogs, mostly relying on smaller boats and investments on the docks.

“You’re going to see how different, smaller ferries but larger than water taxi-type boats are going to start operating and hopefully we’ll start to see examples of that and new docks start to be installed, especially in the port lands,” he said.

Toronto City Councillor Ausma Malik seconded the Mayor’s motion, saying boats and the docks are both on the radar.

“So the issues around docks, around lineups, around improving the affordability and accessibility, these are all really important aspects of the exploration that we’ve directed staff to do around water taxis.”

The City has approved spending $92 million to upgrade its ferry fleet to include two brand-new boats that will run on electric power which would boost the ferry capacity by over 400 passengers per trip, according to a staff report. However, the ferries – which are currently under construction – are not expected to be ready until late 2026 and early 2027.

There has also been preliminary discussion on the feasibility of building a bridge from the mainland to the island but that process is in the beginning stages according to officials.

A report is expected from city staff early in 2025 looking at all opportunities to improve access to the islands in both the medium and longer term.