Here are your new ferry hours

For your convenience:

Augustine said Veolia hopes to open service up at 6 a.m. and possibly include rides later into the evening. Service presently begins at 7:15 a.m. Monday through Thursday, and  ends at 6:45 p.m. Service on Friday goes until 8 p.m. and runs a reduced schedule on Saturdays and Sundays.

Got that?  I guess it makes sense if you're headed to the Point in order to visit Daigle's Grocery which famously keeps similar hours.   If you're just trying to actually get somewhere on a reasonable schedule, though, it's not anything to celebrate.

They celebrated anyway.

The key to potential longer hours will be encouraging more residents to use the ferries, providing Veolia — the company that manages the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority buses and streetcars — the money needed to increase the ferry’s schedule, officials said Tuesday as they formally marked the beginning of the firm’s operation of the ferries.

“The more people who use it, the more sustainable it’ll be over time,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said.

But while many cheered the end of months of uncertainty about whether the Veolia management deal would go through, some West Bank residents said there was little to celebrate.

“It’s a bit of a farce that they’re celebrating something that was taken away and then given back with less and costing more,” said Lance Vargas, a Jackson Square artist who has lived in Algiers Point for 10 years.

I linked this yesterday, but there's more from Varg on this topic.