Port Jefferson Ferry



I don’t know why I waited so long to try this. For nearly all my holidays throughout the year I would travel from Boston to Central Long Island. This is usually a 6 hour journey if you include traffic when driving near New York City. Typically I would drive to Albany the day before in order to break this trip up into a slightly more manageable 3 hour trip + 4 hour trip. As I grow to abhor long car journeys I’ve recently been looking into alternatives. This ferry has long been on my mind as an option to “cut the hypotenuse”. Given gas price and toll price increases, I decided to bite the bullet and try. Here is the itinerary for those curious about cost/time savings:

4:30 arrive at Port Jefferson

4:45 begin boarding ferry

4:55 ferry departs

6:05 ferry lands

6:10 disembark ferry

total time 1 hour 40 minutes

Now to do some rough math for comparision.

From Central Long Island to Bridgeport Connecticut is about 90 miles. By car with traffic, that takes about 2 hours. When I did this route I ended up paying about $11 in tolls. My car averages about 23 mpg. If we price gas at $4/gallon, that’s about $16. So $37 total.

The port is about a 30 mile drive from Central Long Island, which would cost about $5 to drive. The ferry costs about $85 total with 1 driver and unlimited passengers. Driver alone would be about $65. Let’s assume we’re taking a family. So $90 total.

So given the very rough math above, with 1 passenger, you are paying $53 to save roughly 60 miles on your car, and about 20 minutes of total travel time.

And that gap can only decreases depending on how you value the time spent. Even though you are only saving about 20 minutes, you are converting 1 hour and 40 minutes of extremely congested driving, into 1 hour and 40 minutes of leisure. During the ferry trip I read my book while eating some chicken fingers and fries I ordered from the kitchen. They had a bar on the boat if you’d like a drink.

As gas prices and toll prices increase, the ferry route only increases in value. Here are some picture I took while on the ferry.