Ferry, Ferry Bad

In the midst of a five-day heat streak, we shift ground to the Sunshine Coast, which trip includes a picturesque ferry ride on a picturesque ferry. It is picturesque, but I grow increasingly irritated with the fact of having to go anywhere via ferry.

When we moved here, the ferry was never a problem: there was lots of room for cars so you didn’t have to come way early, and you could buy and use discount ticket books easily. Nowadays, not easy at all, summer or winter. First of all, the traffic to the Sunshine Coast has increased dramatically but the number of ferry trips has increased very little. Second, the price of the ferry ticket has increased regularly and considerably and they no longer allow you to buy books of tickets at a discount. Instead, they have devised a system by which the ferry corporation sells you a debit card that must always have a value of at least $75.00. Which is to say, they always have the free use of $75.00 worth of your (and everyone else who uses the card’s) money.

When you use the debit card, they give you a receipt that is almost incomprehensible, stating as it does what they are charging you and what surcharges they are adding, and what discount you are getting for using the debit card, but nowhere stating what is the basis for these charges/credits. And then you get a second receipt that tells you the balance on your debit card after all that has happened, but does not tell you what was on your debit card before all that happened. Which means you have to keep track of it yourself with the receipts from last time. Isn't electronic information supposed to make things easier?

It’s not that it’s incomprehensible, actually. It’s just that you are in a long line of cars just before this transaction takes place. Then you are expected to drive away immediately without even having a chance to look at the receipt. By the time you get that chance, you are sailing away, far away from the place where that financial transaction took place. Regularly, when I talk about this with people I know who use the ferry, the conversation slides around to the topic of whether the ferry corporation is actually cheating us in some way during this transaction. That is remarkable, I think. I don’t know any other institution which automatically is thought to be cheating its customers in ordinary transactions. At least I don’t think it of any other institution. The ferry corporation, doubtless, thinks all of this is a step toward efficiency, but what it is, is a giant step toward distrust, as well as obscurity, which is to say the opposite of transparency. Where we cannot see, we are likely to think something nefarious is going on.

So now we have a ferry corporation that doesn’t provide good service and that we feel is cheating us. How good is that for PR? Up here on the coast, there is a feeling that ferry service ought to be treated as part of the highway system. The logic is strongly with that position, as far as I am concerned, although I could doubtless be easily out-argued by those who say, ‘Well you chose to go there, you know.”

The idea that we should all bear the consequences of our decisions is an interesting part of public policy discussions nowadays. Sometimes, it seems appropriate to me, mostly not, and that is because we seldom make decisions whose consequences we can understand. People decided to move to the Sunshine Coast. Were they supposed to know that in the future there would be a large population growth and that the ferry corporation would make no effort to respond proportionately to that? Should those who moved to the exclave that is Point Roberts (I love that word, exclave) have realized that an attack on the World Trade Center or some comparable building would lead to a very difficult border? Seems hard to make that case.

Certainly I never thought about/anticipated either of those things, but with the great wisdom of hindsight, I could conclude that, when contemplating a move, beware of isolated locations. Best to stay in New Orleans, say, or even Los Angeles. Who could blame the residents of those places if, say, there was a hurricane or a major earthquake that changed everything?