Highlight: Take an urban ferry in Hamburg!
Join the UITP Summit 2025 in Hamburg and take an unmissable ferry journey! Using the city-wide public transport ticket, it’s possible to ride any of the 20 piers dotted along the Elbe River and carries passengers from the city centre to the industrial port, suburbs, docks, beaches, and more.
The Elbe is one of Europe’s great rivers. Nearly 25 million people live along and around it, stretching from Hamburg to Prague. It goes without saying that having a river that can be as wide as 400m (about four times that of the Seine in central Paris) is an economic asset for a port city – though it also provides a great opportunity for waterborne mobility.
“I always recommend a ferry ride which is included in the public transport ticket!”
– Julia Wissel,
Director of Product, MOIA
Explore Hamburg’s unique mobility system. Discover the full report!
The services of HADAG, Hamburg’s ferry operator, are well integrated into the wider public transport system, and that’s a strength of the city. “We have a difficult geography. But we in Hamburg can show how a network that involves many different modes really works”, says Normen Wiegand, the Head of Metro Operations at HOCHBAHN.
Here are just a few facts about ferries in Hamburg:
• 180,000 annual journeys
• Eight ferry lines
• 26 ships
• New environmentally friendly plug-in hybrid boats are already in operation – the latest launched on 16 September 2024
Photo © Marc-Oliver Schulz/HADA
Cutting Hamburg in half, the Elbe feeds into hundreds of canals. Waterways are a fact of life in Hamburg – indeed, Hamburg actually has the most bridges of any city on the planet. However, only two of those bridges actually cross the Elbe itself, owing to its grand size. And that makes the ferry an invaluable way to travel!
Explore the report!
Hamburg has ambitious goals for its mobility network, from ferries to buses and cycling.
The city is in the middle of over a dozen state-of-the-art projects, which will give guests of the UITP Summit 2025 from all over the world a genuine behind the scenes look at what it really takes to transform a city’s public transport network into a modern, sustainable, and efficient service.
Discover Hamburg! Download the full report.
Credits: Article cover image © Marc-Oliver Schulz/HADA