How many lanes a boat ramp has, and why it matters on a Saturday
Lane count is the single best predictor of how long you will wait on a busy morning.
2,008 are single-lane and 1,519 have two or more; the largest published count is 22
Where the number is published, 57% of ramps are single-lane. A single lane is not a small inconvenience: it serialises everything. One driver who arrives with the transom straps still on, or who parks the trailer before moving the boat off the ramp, holds up every rig behind them.
Reading a lane count practically
- One lane: expect a queue after about 07:00 on any fair-weather weekend, and rig completely in the parking lot before you approach.
- Two lanes: usually enough that a slow launch does not stop the ramp, provided nobody uses the second lane as a tie-up.
- Three or more: normally a reservoir or coastal ramp built for tournament traffic, and usually paired with a large trailer lot.
- A published count of zero means the agency recorded the field and the structure is not a lane-type ramp — commonly a hand-launch or a carry-down.
Lane count and parking capacity together tell you more than either alone. A two-lane ramp with 14 trailer spaces fills by mid-morning; a one-lane ramp with 60 spaces means the bottleneck is the concrete, not the lot.
Figures on this page are counted from the agency records behind this site each time it is built, and every count states the population it was computed over. See the sources.