The free Nights of Lights shuttle runs 23 dates, and not on Christmas Day

The city’s free Park and Ride shuttle opens the Nights of Lights season on Saturday, Nov. 21, and the service page the city published Monday lists every date it will run between then and Jan. 2. Three dates fall in November, eighteen in December and two in January, which is twenty-three nights by this paper’s count of the city’s own list.

One date is missing from that list and it is Dec. 25, which falls on a Friday this year. Christmas night is not on it. The season’s own explanatory note promises every Friday, every Saturday and most Sundays in December, along with daily service through the week of Christmas to New Year’s Day. The list runs Dec. 24 and then Dec. 26, so a reader who wants to see the lights on Christmas night is driving in and parking downtown like any other night of the year.

The dates, as the city prints them

Hours run 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. on every one of those dates except Dec. 5, when the shuttle starts five hours earlier at 8 a.m. because the Christmas Parade is that morning, a change both the schedule page and Monday’s release carry in the same words. The page calls these select peak dates and describes the service in four steps. The fourth is the one worth reading twice: the shuttle will pick you up at the Visitor Information Center and take you back to your car before the service ends for the night. That is the only thing either document says about a last departure, and neither of them prints a time for it, so the eleven o’clock on the schedule is when the service stops rather than when the last bus leaves town. For anything more specific than that the release sends a reader to the Nights of Lights mobile app, which it says carries all of the parking and shuttle information and which is not a document this paper can archive.

Where to leave the car

Three lots, all outside the historic district and all free: Broudy’s at 198 W. King Street, the North San Marco lot at 301 San Marco Avenue, and the St. Johns County Health Department at 200 San Sebastian View. None of the three is downtown. That is the point of them. Every shuttle drops off and picks up at a single point, the Visitor Information Center at 10 S. Castillo Drive, and the release is more specific than the schedule page is about where, naming the north drive-through lane at the trolley entrance.

A second service exists on opening night only, and it is not on the shuttle page at all. The city’s release adds an Anastasia Island run for Saturday, Nov. 21 alone, from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. It leaves from Anastasia Baptist Church at 1650 A1A South and R.B. Hunt Elementary at 125 Magnolia Drive. It drops at the corner of Gerado Street and Flagler Boulevard in North Davis Shores, at the east end of the Bridge of Lions. That run is provided by Historic Tours of America rather than by the city, which the release states in its closing line and which the page carrying the schedule does not mention anywhere, so a reader who goes to the page with the dates on it will not learn that the island service exists at all.

What the page says about getting a wheelchair on board

The accessibility paragraph is worth reading in the city’s own words rather than in anybody’s summary of them, because it says two things in sequence and both of them matter to somebody planning the trip around a chair. The first is that the shuttle fleet is ADA compliant, stated without qualification under a heading that reads ADA-Accessible Shuttles and Service Animals. The second, two sentences later, is that during the high-demand Nights of Lights season not all shuttles are equipped with wheelchair lifts or ramps, and that a rider may experience a wait while an accessible shuttle is dispatched to their location.

Only trained service animals as defined by the ADA are permitted on board, and the page says plainly that pets and emotional support animals are not. Neither the page nor the release gives a cost for any part of this service, a count of vehicles, or the name of whoever operates the three main routes. The fare is the only figure the city publishes about it. It is nothing, which is the entire argument for running the thing.

The season opens on Saturday, Nov. 21, the shuttle starts at one that afternoon from all three lots, and the island run that evening is the only service of the twenty-three nights that somebody other than the city is providing.