Originally Posted by
chornedsnorkack
Much of the coastal ferry stuff is surely regular public transport - most islands, including Hainan, cannot be reached by ground transport. And there are plenty of shortcuts which are regular public transport, too - across Bohai between Shandong and Liaodong, across Pearl River... Yangtze does have around 60 bridges over the 2900 km between Yibin and sea by now.
We'll put something together, though I'm not sure how much first-hand experience we can jointly muster on all these routes. And yes, while coastal ferry is public transport, for FT demographics, it would tend to be the least likely to be used, vs the other methods already presented, which were judged to be of higher priority. As unpaid volunteers with other claims on our time, there is only so much output we can do for the forum in a given year.
If you have first-hand experience on any aspect of water transport in China, shoot me a PM (or if lengthy, use the email in my profile) and it can get incorporated into this effort. Actually, that offer is open to anybody reading this post.