Mayor Bloomberg's favorite cheap date, and our favorite cheap bar with a view, is free to ride. But it isn't actually free to run, obviously. And in fact, despite some of the highest ridership in a generation, it is getting more expensive now than it used to be (but it is getting better!). The Staten Island Advance crunched some official numbers and found that the average actual cost, per passenger per trip, for the ferry is $4.86, up 57 percent from a decade ago.
For some perspective, total ferry ridership in fiscal year 2012 was 22.178 million. How that compares to previous years is hard to say, because records from earlier decades are hard to pin down, but the Advance says that the year the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened ridership appears to have peaked at 27.5 million and has never gotten close to that again. Meanwhile, the cost for getting those 22.178 million merry passengers back and forth all night on the ferry? About $108 million total. On the plus side, the cost per passenger has actually been dropping since 2008 when it was $5.69!
Still, high costs or not, the Department of Transportation has no plans to charge for the ferry or any of its potentially outdoor-seating-less new boats. Otherwise Staten Island becomes the only borough without a single free means of access. Plus, how else to get hungry diners to that new sit-down restaurant in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in St. George?
