Economies of scale and the Digby ferry

I had the pleasure last week of traveling the Saint John to Digby ferry. Among the wide assortment of oddities that indicate what’s left of my personality, I cite ferry travel as my current favourite.

It has the charm of sea travel without the motion sickness. It allows a relaxed sort of friendliness and provides people-watching and reading joys for those more inclined to relative hermitage.

The crossing from Saint John to Digby was a delight. The boat has been upgraded recently, the staff were terrific and even the food has improved. The folks on this journey were as interesting and diverse as you would find anywhere, drawn widely from different nations and classes. And they shared, as do those who choose train travel, the well-kept secret of how to drive the gap in life.

Providing more authenticity of personality than you find common these days of mass culture, the crossing ended with the joy of seeing a small school of porpoises.

All of this made me glad that at least the Federal and Nova Scotia governments are prepared to keep the ferry afloat until more of us rediscover its charm, not to mention its eco-efficiencies. The problem last week was the ferry was at best one-third full.

Why not full?

After having traveled this ferry on and off from 1972, I was surprised by this. And it set me thinking, in that lazy sort of way that summer invites, about what might explain it. Some of it stems from the fact that our tourism trade is in decline. Some of it stems from the improvement in the road system that connects Nova Scotia with New England, Quebec and Ontario. But these accounts are insufficient.

One of the lessons that the airlines have learned is how to fill the plane. Sometimes this goal of eking out every dollar from every flight leaves people bumped and bummed out, or with their knees up to their necks. Airlines are, to my mind, too ruthless in serving the bottom line, not to mention serving the bank accounts of their CEOs. But they have figured out how to employ economies of scale to virtually everyone’s advantage.

Economies of scale, put simply, recognize the relative efficiency of serving more clients with service already provided. As long as quality remains the same, as long as other values are not lost in the process, it is rational to fill a plane when it’s due to fly regardless. Just as it is more rational economically and responsible ecologically to have a bus and subway service in a city than it is to have everyone drive in alone. As long as the service is used, that is.

Don’t always make sense

Of course, economies of scale don’t always make sense. Sure, it is sometimes more efficient to have all of our beer brewed in one large vat in Montreal than it is to build a brewery in every village, but the difference to be protected is found in quaffing.

And sure, we could run all town and county municipal governments from Halifax, but we would lose the ability to pursue our community’s distinctiveness, not to mention the democratic vibrancy of small-scale direct democracy. So economies of scale are not always a panacea.

But in the case of the Digby/Saint John Ferry, the boat could be a lot fuller than it was that day without losing any of its charm. The trick, if you consult the airlines, is getting the price right.

Setting lower or more layered prices for individual crossings may well do wonders for the use of the service and, as a bonus, expand the base of tourists considering a visit to the Valley and South Shore. I can’t help but think that doing so would be easier if we hadn’t sold this ferry to the private sector. While I don’t want readers to think that I write from the left, sometimes public ownership just makes economic sense.

Governments have the luxury of not having always to meet the bottom line expectation of shareholders’ short-term interests, and we may yet need to revisit the question of remaking Digby/Saint John a public service.

In the meantime, it may be time for our privatized regional ferry services to study efficiencies of scale in airline pricing.