While SFMTA burns through millions on apps and consulting contracts, one Bay Area commuter just casually built a live ferry tracker in their spare time — on the boat, no less.

The project is a real-time tracker for SF Bay Ferry that maps every vessel crossing the water between San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda, and beyond. It even includes ferry systems in Seattle, New York, and Sydney, because apparently one person with a laptop and some free time can out-ship entire municipal transit agencies.

The tracker lets users switch between agencies, view routes, and even watch a 24-hour time-lapse of ferry movements. It's clean, it's functional, and it was built by someone who just genuinely loves riding the ferry. No $2 million consulting study. No three-year procurement process. No committee.

This is the kind of thing that makes you simultaneously proud of individual ingenuity and furious at government inefficiency. San Francisco spends staggering sums on transit technology — remember Muni's perpetually broken arrival predictions? — and yet a solo developer riding the 6:30 a.m. to the Ferry Building built something arguably more useful as a side project.

The SF Bay Ferry itself deserves more love, frankly. It's one of the most pleasant, reliable ways to cross the bay, and it remains chronically underutilized compared to the overcrowded, delay-prone BART system. If anything, this tracker should be a wake-up call: invest in ferry service, expand the routes, and for the love of all things fiscally responsible, stop reinventing the wheel when talented citizens are already building the tools.

The broader lesson here is one we keep learning in San Francisco: the best solutions often come from individuals who care, not from bureaucracies with budgets. When a single commuter can ship a multi-city transit tracker faster than the city can update a bus schedule PDF, maybe it's time to rethink how we allocate our transit technology dollars.

Fair winds to this builder. The rest of city government should be taking notes.