With a rush of churning water then a jolt, the Karaoglanoglu ferry docks at Karakoy passenger terminal on Istanbul’s European shore and a familiar rite begins.
Young men dart from the waiting room and leap aboard before the gangway is fixed, racing for a prized spot on the benches just above the water.
Parents with children make for the top deck of the 34-year-old ferry, the best place for feeding the flocks of seagulls, which swoop to catch morsels of bread as they fly.
Photo: Reuters
Huge changes lie in store for how the residents of this growing city of almost 15 million people cross the Bosporus Strait, which separates its European and Asian shores.
The government will shortly tender a third Bosporus bridge, expected to bear rail as well as vehicles, and on the seabed giant tubes will encase a privately operated commuter rail link, the Marmaray, and another a twin-deck road.
While these projects will offer speed, convenience and landmark engineering, they are unlikely to capture people’s hearts in the same way as the old-fashioned ferries.
Even the city itself acknowledges the affection in which the ferry boats are held.
Istanbul Municipality this month sold its high-speed passenger and vehicle ferries to a Turkish-Scottish consortium for US$861 million — but hived off the slower boats into a separate firm, Sehir Hatlari (City Lines), to be kept in state hands.
“Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality wanted to keep operating those lines as a public service,” said Hamdi Ugur, vice president at Finansinvest, which advised the city on the privatization.
Municipal transport experts say the city is trying to invite large private investment, but also segment the market and ensure affordability for its residents whose income spectrum is huge.
High-speed vessels charge more than double the traditional ferries to make a slightly longer distance crossing.
“People would riot if we cut the ferries’ journey time by even a minute,” said Suleyman Genc, manager of City Lines, whose boats carry 150,000 people a day and charge 1.75 Turkish lira (US$1.14) for the 20-minute crossing.
“It is the most pleasant form of transport in Istanbul,” he said.
A look at the expressions of content and repose aboard the Karaoglanoglu, as passengers drink dainty glasses of Turkish tea from the buffet, or photograph yet again the famous skyline, corroborates his view.
Elsewhere in Istanbul vehicles are lined bumper-to-bumper on the Bosporus and Fatih Sultan Mehmet suspension bridges, crowded buses stand in gridlocked rush-hour roads and taxi drivers honk in fury at the congestion.
“Istanbul is beautiful, the Bosporus is beautiful, but the ferries make them even more beautiful,” said Hasan Cebesoy, a 48-year-old civil servant sitting on the outside deck, crossing to the Asian side of the city.
The history of sea transport in Istanbul reflects the history of a city to which modernization and industrialization came suddenly.
At first a few solitary steam boats began to operate in Ottoman Istanbul’s waters, but such was their popularity that by 1851 the state founded its own ferry company — from which today’s City Lines derives.
Turkish Nobel laureate writer Orhan Pamuk describes how the city’s residents doted on every ferry ever owned by City Lines and how his father could recognize each boat by its silhouette.
When the city needed to add to its fleet in 2005, it allowed the public to vote on their favorite model. They chose the vessel most closely resembling the ones they knew and loved.
“I always sit upstairs for the view and of course I find the old ferries the most beautiful,” 65-year-old pensioner Esmet Ulukut said, fondly patting a wooden window sill.
“I wouldn’t want to use any of the tunnels under the sea, I wouldn’t want to take the risk,” he said.
The decommissioning in 2008 of the Fenerbahce ferry, built in Glasgow in 1952 and widely considered the most beautiful, sparked protests.
“That length of service is two or three times longer than the average life of a ferry,” Genc said.
The vessels’ unusual slender frame caters to the challenges of serving in one of the world’s busiest shipping straits.
“Maneuverabilty is very important. They have to serve crowded harbours where at rush hour a ferry might be arriving every 15 minutes. They also need to unload and reload passengers very rapidly,” said Ilhan Or, professor of industrial engineering at Istanbul’s Bosporus University.
Sea traffic will no longer grow in Istanbul, he thinks, largely because it is comparatively slow and the density of transit traffic in the Bosporus keeps strict speed limits in place.
Genc believes new modes of crossing the Bosporus will eventually hit numbers, but that a future for the ferries as a nostalgic tour service awaits — much in the way a historic tram now transports tourists along Istanbul’s busiest shopping strip.
“Although our passenger numbers will fall, the number of tourists to Istanbul will increase. So in future we may focus more on tourist tours rather than commuter transportation,” he said.
“We already have a fantastic Golden Horn tour ... but Istanbulites don’t know about it,” Genc said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY ECE TOKSABAY
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to