In local news, Rochester, NY’s newly elected mayor stuck a fork in our “fast ferry” yesterday. It’s done.

For anyone not familiar with this, the original idea was a ferry service connecting Rochester and Toronto. Here’s some background and comments, courtesy of Rochester bloggers (with one Canadian thrown in for good measure):

Blogger Matty B writes:

I for one am not surprised. Granted, Americans would be more than willing to take the boat across the lake to Toronto. It’s a huge city. But what Canadian would want to leave a city of 4 million people and come to Rochester, a city with about 240,000 people?

Matty adds that ferry fare [ed. — that one’s mine, ha ha ha] was around $80/round trip, almost twice what it costs him in gas to make the trip by car.

Sheepguardingllama posts:

It has been losing $1,000,000 a month all year in 2005. The first company that ran the ferry lost a fortune. Everyone involved with the ferry in any way has lost a fortune. There was no business plan for the thing at all. The new mayor said that if they raised the prices by twenty percent (which are all ready so high that no one can afford to ride the ferry compared to driving or taking the Amtrak route – both of which are faster and more convenient as well) and managed to back the boat to seventy-five percent capacity on every single run that the city would manage to lose only two million dollars a year!! But that is only the beginning of the story. Because the entire ferry infrastructure is only designed to transport Americans to Canada it also means a high level of lost revenue as Rochesterians begin to do more and more shopping in Toronto instead of at home.

From Canada, The Green Knight has this to add:

. . . there was never any involvement of Canadian governments, businesses, or media; hardly any advertisement in Canada, and no sense that the Rochesterians were ever actually trying to involve Canada or Canadians in the project.

Commorato posts:

It was perhaps the dumbest decision we ever made and the damn thing has been in ruins ever since. It crashed on its first trip out, the motor froze, the company that ran it before we had to buy it shutdown and stopped paying people. God this thing sucked.

In his comments, his readers note that the port in Rochester lacked both vending machines, and even more absurd, a currency exchange.

And at A Moment’s Tale:

I can’t think of a single projection at this point that came true, a single premise of the ferry that ended up reality. It was supposed to get tons of truck traffic. Nope. It was supposed to get tons of tourist traffic from Toronto. Nope. It was supposed to turn a profit. Nope. Instead, it bankrupted one company and drove an authority into massive debt.

A friend of mine (who is hopefully a reader — are you there?) once made the rather elegant comment that the ferry might work if marketed to Canadians as a “gateway to the Finger Lakes.” That idea had merit, IMO, for two reasons. First, it got around the awkward question of why anyone would choose a weekend in Rochester (which is a lovely place to live, but still!) to one in Toronto. The other plus is implicit: make the ferry “belong” to all of Western and Central New York, not just our city’s. More necks to support the albatross, maybe we could have kept it alive long enough to work.

But that’s all moot, now.

Here’s the Democrat & Chronicle piece, which calls Mayor Duffy’s announcement “stunning.” Huh?

Update: If you haven’t been to the Finger Lakes, here’s a tiny taste. View of Cayuga Lake, looking northward from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell.

Update 2: another Rochester take from Zinnian Democracy:

This is a shame really. I wish they had let it go for another season to see what it would do, but too many people here are negative and they felt from the beginning that “Why would anyone want to come to Rochester?” You’ve gotten your wish.