Planning

Hudson River Commuter Ferry Wake Study

The New Jersey Department of Transportation's Office of Maaritime Resources (NJDOT/OMR) contracted the Stevens Institute of Technology Davidson Laboratory to study the on-going wake wash issue in the Hudson River. The study mainly took a look at the wake characteristics of ferries run by the NY Waterway ferry service provider, the largest operator in the region.

The study consisted of two phases; field studies and physical model studies.

The field study was further divided into two parts. The first part was concerned mainly with a qualitative observational study of NY Waterway ferries in operation. In the second part, measurements were made of surface elevation time history near a marina using a pressure gauge to obtain more qualitative information about the wake wash.

The physical model study involved measuring wake wash of small-scale models in the laboratory towing tank.

Based on these studies, several conclusions and recommendations are presented in this report.

• Ferry Wake Wash in NY/NJ Harbor (pdf 1.7m)
• Commuter Ferry Wake in New York Harbor (pdf 2.3m)

Stevens has also published a paper in the Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on High Performance Marine Vehicles (Wake Impacts pdf 537k) that describes the wake project and includes the latest results from their field measurements and modeling efforts.

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the PDF files which is available at our state Adobe Acrobat Access page.