Halifax council Tuesday voted to severely cut ferry service. For the downtown-Alderney ferry, council’s vote cuts the morning Sunday service before 11:30am, reduces the current 15-minute weekday schedule from noon to 2pm to 30 minutes, and ends service with the Halifax-departing 10:15pm ferry Monday through Thursday.
For the Woodside ferry, the cuts remove the weekday ferry leaving Woodside at 9:37am, as well as the return ferry leaving Halifax at 9:52am.
Council’s decision for these cuts was actually a compromise. Metro Transit had asked council to also cut the late-night Friday and Saturday service, but council rejected that proposal. As a result, ferries on Friday and Saturday nights will continue to run its current schedule—the last ferry will leave downtown Halifax at 11:45pm and arrive in Dartmouth at midnight.
Metro Transit had asked council to cut service to reflect service standards council had adopted last year. Those standards call for a minimum of 98 passengers in the commuting direction during peak hours, and 73 in the the heavy direction on off-peak hours. Actual ridership in the late hours is often fewer than 20 passengers.
But several councillors pointed out that the ferry service as a whole is running more efficiently than the bus service as a whole. Metro Transit manager Eddie Robar confirmed as much, saying that in terms of direct rider payments, the ferries collect between 68 and 70 percent of their operating costs, while direct rider payments are responsible for just 40 percent of bus operational costs.
While transit ridership is subsidized, the money spent on transit dwarfs what would be much larger expenditures for widening and repairing roads, and for building new roads, were transit riders given no option but to drive cars. Moreover, ferry supporters argue that the late-night service is an important component of economic development downtown.
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2012.
Typical of the Duchy of Grand Fuckwit. Take the one thing that Metro Transit does right and begin the process of Death by a 1000 Cuts. When will these idiots look at a map and have that lightbulb moment of clarity and realize that HRM is a hostage to geography and so are it’s public transit users. Taking that first step towards ultimately eliminating the sole route in this burg that offers a direct line from Point A to Point B and back again is so counter-intuitive that one wonders why Council has taken this long to approve it. Say Goodbye to the sole enjoyable public transit experience in this rotten little hamlet.
Oh now I remember why they just got a huge pay increase; to do less work.
there has never been an enjoyable public transit experience in halifax
Not so, Brandon. On choppy days you can pretend you’re Jurgen Prochnow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_bs8Z40UPM…
I hope council continues on with it’s idiotic, myopic behaviour, it will make the oncoming revolution much more palatable to the masses…
If people aren’t going to use it, why waste the money? I hear people bitching about it but the ridership isn’t there. Use it or lose it.
But people do use it Bro Tim. In fact, on Sundays, the ferry’s slowest day, there are still over 1000 passengers daily. This compares to less than 350 passengers for the buses on routes 5,15,31,33,35, 83,85,86,88 and 165. So I guess the plan is to subsidize suburban bus routes that aren’t used, and cut back on the inner city routes that are used and have the best chance at expansion (with the high-density development happening in Downtown Dartmouth and Halifax.) Ridership based on past use, without looking to present and future developmen t is idiotic in the extreme.
Do ferries cost more three times more per hour to run than buses? Or does the rest of the municipality think chipping away at the oldest passenger ferry service in North America is politically advantageous?