Passenger and vehicle traffic aboard the Alaska Marine Highway System moved slightly higher in 2024 from 2023, but still is less than half its peak from the early 1990s.
The state ferries carried just over 185,000 passengers and about 65,000 vehicles last year on its routes stretching from Southeast to Prince William Sound and into several Gulf of Alaska coastal communities.
That’s down from more than 400,000 passengers and 110,000 vehicles 1990-1992.
And it’s down from more than 325,000 passengers as recently as the early 2010s.
Marine Director Craig Tornga presented the numbers twice on Feb. 11 — to the House Transportation Committee and at the Southeast Conference, which was meeting in Juneau for its annual winter session of community and business leaders.
Traffic is up substantially from the devastating travel cutbacks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when ridership fell to 52,000 passengers and 27,000 vehicles systemwide. The numbers have been on a steady increase since then but still are behind the pre-pandemic years of 2018 and 2019.
Though the state operates on a fiscal year budget of July 1 to June 30, the ferry system’s passenger counts are for calendar years.
The decline in traffic — due in great part to fewer ships operating each year — is cutting into revenue from ticket sales, requiring a larger amount of state and federal dollars.
In the 2024 fiscal year, with just six vessels in service, the marine highway brought in $35 million in revenue, compared with nearly $51 million in 2019, when the fleet numbered nine vessels.
The system operated 10 or 11 vessels from 2004 to 2016.
Mechanical and rust problems with the old fleet and a chronic shortage of crew the past several years have forced the ferry system to scale back the number of ships it can put into service, further cutting into revenues.
State spending cuts instituted during Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s first year in office in 2019 further reduced the ferry system’s level of service.
The state has not operated the popular gross-gulf route from Southeast to Southcentral Alaska the past several years.
The Dunleavy administration is counting on the ferries to increase their ticket sales by $4 million annually this year and next, but Tornga said the inability to operate cross-gulf sailings limits the system’s ability to substantially increase its sales and revenues.
“If we had the cross-gulf going, that’s always another higher revenue,” he said.
The proposed ferry system budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1 totals almost $160 million, with almost half covered by federal grants and the rest coming from passenger fares and the state general fund.
Iris Samuels of the Anchorage Daily News contributed reporting for this story.
Reader Comments(0)