The Pensacola Beach Ferry Service

The geniuses who run this backwater burgh we call Pensacola, Florida, in a misguided effort to decrease the ridiculous vehicular traffic on the beach every weekend, will be instituting a ferry service between downtown and Pensacola Beach. Small ferries, you ask? Oh nooooo! Big ferries. But not car ferries...people ferries...150 passenger ferries.

A round-trip ticket is supposedly going to be $20. We'll see.

Two big boats have been purchased with a $5.2 million grant from BP Oil as a result of their Deepwater Horizon disaster back in 2010. An operator has been found that is experienced in such things. In the newspaper, they say they will hire between 30 and 40 people. Service is scheduled to begin (fingers crossed!) June 15th. No ticket kiosks or infrastructure of any kind is in place right now. Personally, I think the start-date is kind of optimistic.  We'll see.  

The ferry operator hopes to attract 900 people per day. And by that we can assume that they mean "Saturday and Sunday." Because nobody is going to take the ferry during the week, period. Weekly ridership will probably not even cover the expenses of running the two boats on those days.

Hmm, let's think about this. 900 people per day? They're dreaming. We're talking LSD-induced fantasyland here. But let's humor them! Let's figure 900 people times $20 equals $18,000 per day - less if we deduct the discounts for groups, military, children and senior citizens they're talking about. Still, setting those aside for the moment, that's potentially $36,000 for the weekend...and...ohhhh, let's be optimistic...maybe another 500 people during the week, or an additional $10,000 revenue, giving gross sales of $46,000 for the week. Roughly $180,000 for the month.

“Great!” you say. ”That's a lot of money!”

But hold on a minute. That's not year-round revenue. The ferries may be able to generate that kind of revenue on nice weekends during May, June, July and August. Maybe. But there's no way...no way! they can sustain that kind of traffic year 'round. I don't even know if they intend to run the ferries all year long, but the revenue has to be spread over twelve months because the costs of the boats and the infrastructure (piers, etc) don't go away. I'm not sure what the ferry service's annual operating costs are, but I'll bet that they're considerable! And I'll bet that the service will only run six months out of the year.

And let's not forget that even in the summer, not every weekend is suitable for the beach. We do get storms! Hurricane Season runs from the beginning of June through November. So there's always that possibility. But in addition, the ferry probably won't run if the water is particularly rough. So a storm out in the Gulf of Mexico that doesn't affect our local weather might render the boats unusable.

But again, let's be generous...let's assume they can do $750,000 in revenue for the year.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about operating boats. However I do know a lot about operating airplanes and helicopters. And I'm sure that boats can be just as expensive to maintain, even when you're not using them. And while I have no idea what their actual operating costs are going to be, I suspect that the service will operate at a loss.  While the purchase of the ferries may have been subsidized, the operating costs are not.  It cannot run at a loss.

As I said and believe, the passenger ferry service is misguided. But the government has to do something. The weekend traffic out on the beach has gotten unbearable. It often takes an hour or more to get out to the beach at midday on a weekend.

The beach is a victim of its own success. It's beautiful! We've got that famous sugar-white sand. We've got some really good hotels, restaurants and clubs. As we used to say in the groovy 1960's, the beach is happening, man! Our Chamber of Commerce markets it heavily. We are known as “The Redneck Riviera” due to all of the visitors we get from Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. It's not flattering but it's true.

Another part of this is due to our idiotic local residents. We've got about 300,000 people in the surrounding Pensacola area. And on the warm, sunny weekends they all want to go to the beach. These morons can't seem to get up before eleven a.m. They get on the road around noon, all heading for the beach. Anyone who's lived here through one summer knows that the beach gets FULL every Saturday and Sunday without fail. By one p.m. there is literally no place left to park. Traffic through the city of Gulf Breeze is choked to a standstill. The Three-Mile Bridge that goes across Pensacola Bay to Gulf Breeze gets backed-up all the way to Pensacola. But the faithful are undeterred. By God, they're going to the beach!

Our stupid Santa Rosa Island Authority (the agency that runs the beach) will not detour or shut down the traffic entering the beach; they just let people come and come and fight it out for the parking spots. And those people do come, mostly in cars and big pickup trucks carrying only one or two people. Car-pooling? Not in Pensacola, thank you! As a taxi driver I see this first-hand. As I'm stuck in crawling, bumper-to-bumper traffic, my passengers stare gloomily at the meter, which never stops clicking ever upward. You might say that I'm part of the problem, but I go out there and do not stay; I just drop my people off and leave.

There was talk once about building a multi-story parking garage on the beach. The plans came to naught. Turns out it couldn't be built between the end of one season and the beginning of the next. So that idea was dropped. Recently, someone actually suggested the installation of traffic circles/roundabouts as a way of smoothing the flow of traffic. Traffic circles! The idiots around here can barely navigate a conventional intersection much less one where the rights of way are not clear. Then there are the pedestrians – so many pedestrians!...yet the county will not build crossover bridges to get the people off the roads.

Local governments are horrible at actually solving problems. They'd rather just “kick the can down the road.” Which is what they've done here. The summer traffic problems on Pensacola Beach will not get better on their own. A passenger ferry service will do precious little to help alleviate the overcrowding.

But they can dream!

You can read the story in our local newspaper HERE

https://www.pnj.com/story/news/local/pensacola/beaches/2018/05/09/pensacola-bay-ferry-service-track-start-june-15-says-operator/592403002/