NTD ID 20230 · Full Reporter

Barnegat Bay Decoy & Baymen's Museum

Barnegat Bay Decoy & Baymen's Museum carried 7,343 boardings in FY2023 at $123.48 per ride and $119.03 in subsidy per ride. Ten years of NTD data, by mode.

Tuckerton, NJ New York--Jersey City--Newark, NY--NJ Ferryboat
Also known as BBDBSM
FY2023 boardings
7.3K
vs FY2022
Cost per ride
$123.48
$127.12 in 2024 dollars
Subsidy per ride
$119.03
operating cost less fares
Fare recovery
3.6%
fares average $4.44 per ride
Passenger miles
60.2K
average trip 8.2 miles
Operating cost
$906.7K
$3598.03 per revenue hour
Rides per resident
Rides per revenue hour
29.14
252 hours operated
Passengers aboard
26.04
average at any moment, passenger miles over vehicle miles
Average speed
9.17 mph
in revenue service, stops and traffic included
Cost per vehicle mile
$392.17
what running a mile costs, before anyone boards

What those two numbers mean

Passengers aboard is passenger miles divided by vehicle miles: how many people are on board on average, at any moment. It is the missing term in cost per ride. A service carrying twenty people per vehicle mile and one carrying half a person can spend the same on fuel and wages and arrive at wildly different costs per passenger.

Average speed is vehicle miles divided by vehicle hours, including every stop and every red light. It is the hidden term in cost per mile, because cost per mile is cost per hour divided by speed. A bus network slowing from 13 mph to 11 becomes a fifth more expensive per mile with no change in wages and no change in service.

Profile

Agency profile

As filed with the National Transit Database.

Contact

Legal name
Barnegat Bay Decoy & Baymen's Museum

Organization

Organization type
Reporter type
Full Reporter
Fiscal year ends
Reporting since
FY2023

Service area

Population served
Urbanized area
New York--Jersey City--Newark, NY--NJ · 19.4M people
Vehicles at maximum service

Services operated

Each mode has its own page, with its own ridership, cost and safety.

Ridership

Ridership

Monthly data through December 2023.

This year against the last five

Same months, stacked on one axis, so seasonality does not read as a trend

Annual boardings

Ten-year series

Every month since 2014

The whole series, unsmoothed

Recovery against 2019

Each month against the same month before the pandemic

Cost

Cost and subsidy

Dollar figures are shown as reported and again in current dollars.

Cost and subsidy per ride

As reported

In 2024 dollars

The same series with inflation removed

Why cost per ride moved

Indexed to FY2023 = 100

Cost per ride is the cost of an hour of service divided by the riders carried in that hour. It can only rise for two reasons: service got dearer to produce, or fewer people rode it.

Where the money goes

Operating cost by function

Who pays for it

Federal, state and local funding, 2023 to 2023

Operating and capital money together, in the dollars of each year. Fares are not in this file — FTA took them out of the funding series in 2022 — so "directly generated" here means advertising, concessions, park and ride and taxes the agency levies itself. The farebox is charted above.

Capital

Capital spending

What was spent on building, rebuilding and replacing, shown beside the cost of running the service rather than folded into it.

Operating subsidy per ride
$119.03
FY2023, cost less fares
Capital spent per ride
$1.65
that year's spending, not the cost of the assets
Both together
$120.69
public money spent that year, per boarding
Capital per ride, averaged
$1.65
mean of 1 year

Capital spending since 1992

In 2024 dollars, so the years can be compared. This is the series the estimate above is built from.

Operating and capital, per ride

Stacked, but counted separately. The two are different kinds of number.

Building, or keeping what exists

FY2023. NTD records which of the two every dollar was reported under.

Who pays for what

FY2023. Running the service and building it are funded by different governments.

Total Federal State Local Fares and own revenue
operating $911.4K 0% 0% 0% 100%
capital $12.1K 0% 0% 0% 100%

Fares offset the cost of running the service. They do not meaningfully offset capital, which is why subsidy per ride on this site is an operating figure and stays one.

What these capital figures are not

Spending is not the same as cost
NTD reports what an agency spent on capital in a year, not what its capital cost it that year. Those differ: a system opened in 1904 spends almost nothing on tunnels while consuming an enormous inherited asset every day, and an agency that bought a fleet last year spent a fortune once and will spend nothing for a decade.
Vehicles can be depreciated. Everything else cannot.
FTA's capital series runs from 1992, which covers a bus fleet's working life more than twice over, so averaging rolling-stock spending across one replacement cycle gives a defensible figure for what the fleet costs each year. Track, tunnels, bridges and stations last forty to a hundred years or more. Thirty-three years of spending on those measures recent investment policy, not consumption, so no figure is published for them.
The vehicle figure is an estimate
Cost per ride including vehicles is arithmetic on published spending rather than a published number, and it assumes the agency has been replacing vehicles at roughly the rate it wears them out. Each agency's page says how far that assumption holds for it. It covers vehicles only: no track, no tunnels, no stations.
Year-by-year capital is lumpy
Capital arrives in bursts. A single year of it says more about where an agency sits in its replacement cycle than about the cost of carrying a passenger, which is why the per-ride averages here run across every year available.
Fares do not pay for it
Fare revenue offsets operating cost. It does not meaningfully offset capital, which is funded almost entirely by government. Subsidy per ride on this site is an operating figure and stays that way.

Capital spending by year and use

Year Guideway Stations Vehicles Maintenance buildings Fare collection Other Total
2023 $0 $3.2K $9K $0 $0 $0 $12.1K

Peers

Compared with similar systems

No comparable agencies found.

No comparable agency was found. Peers must serve an urbanized area of between half and twice the population, carry between a quarter and four times the rides, and run the same primary mode.

By mode

By mode

Each service this agency runs, for FY2023. Directly operated and purchased service are summed.

Boardings by mode

Annual, stacked

Cost per ride by mode

FY2023

Mode detail, FY2023

Mode Service Boardings Passenger miles Revenue hours Operating cost Cost / ride Subsidy / ride Fare recovery
Ferryboat Directly operated 7,343 60,214 252 $906,703 $123.48 $119.03 3.6% Detail →

Safety

Safety

Collisions, fires, derailments and security events reported to NTD. Only complete years are shown.

Events by year

All event types, all modes

Events per 100 million revenue miles

This agency against the national rate, on the same axis

Miles rather than boardings, because this series covers 2020: service kept running when riders stopped coming, and a rate per boarding would read that as a collapse in safety. Sitting above the national line is as likely to mean careful reporting as dangerous operation — and rail systems report events on their own right of way that a bus operator never encounters.

The longer record, 2023 to 2023

FTA's threshold-adjusted time series, which reaches back further than the incident file and is built to be compared across years

NTD's reporting threshold changed in 2010, 2015 and 2023. FTA publishes this series adjusted for those changes so the years can be read against each other; the unadjusted counts jump by a third in 2015 on the rule change alone.

Injuries, latest full year
0
Fatalities, latest full year
0
Total events, latest full year
0

Fleet

Fleet, workforce and reliability

How old the vehicles are, how many people run them, and how far they get between breakdowns. NTD publishes all three from 2022 onward.

Staff
19
FY2023, all functions
Vehicle operators
10
10 per vehicle at peak service
Maintenance staff
4
vehicle and facility
Labor hours per revenue hour
6.46
all staff hours over hours of service run

Workforce by mode

Mode Service Hours Operators Vehicle maintenance Administration All staff
Ferryboat Directly operated Part Time 10 0 2 15
Ferryboat Directly operated Full Time 0 0 3 4
Revenue vehicles
1
FY2023
Average age
5 yrs
weighted across the fleet
Past useful life
0%
0 vehicles at or beyond FTA's benchmark
Miles between failures
all mechanical failures, revenue miles

How the fleet has aged, 2023 to 2023

Average vehicle age, weighted across every mode the agency runs

A rising line is not automatically bad and a falling one is not automatically good: a fleet gets younger the year an agency takes delivery, and older every year it does not. What the shape shows is whether replacement is steady or comes in bursts. The table below says how many vehicles are actually past the life FTA expects of them.

Vehicles, and how many are accessible

Active revenue vehicles against those meeting the ADA standard

Fleet age

FTA's default useful life benchmark for each class, from the Transit Asset Management rule

Vehicle type Count Average age FTA benchmark Past FTA benchmark Past own benchmark
Ferryboat 1 5 yrs 42 yrs
0%

Miles between failures

Revenue miles divided by mechanical failures. Higher is better.

NTD counts a failure as major when it stops the vehicle finishing its trip.

Reliability by mode

Mode Service Revenue miles Major failures All failures Miles between failures
Ferryboat Directly operated 2,312 0 0

Fuel and energy

What the fleet burned in FY2023.

Miles by fuel

Comparing miles avoids any energy-equivalence assumption

Fuel by mode

Mode Diesel (gal) Gasoline (gal) CNG (gal eq.) Electric (kWh) Diesel mpg Zero-emission
Ferryboat 1,321 0 0%

All years

Full annual series

Every year this agency reported, as published.

Year Boardings Passenger miles Revenue miles Revenue hours Operating cost Fares Cost / ride Subsidy / ride Fare recovery
2023 7,343 60,214 2,312 252 $906,703 $32,633 $123.48 $119.03 3.6%