Good news for the Texas contingent of our audience, and for anyone who has ever sat in the Harborside Drive crawl on embarkation morning. The Port of Galveston is planning for a fifth cruise terminal, and it's kicking off a mobility study to figure out how to move all those extra humans without turning the island into one giant parking lot.

This matters to us because Galveston is home port for the Carnival Jubilee, the ship this show is arguably obsessed with. The proposed new terminal would sit at Pier 14, between Royal Caribbean's Terminal 10 and the MSC/Norwegian Terminal 16 that opened in 2025. The port wants it up and running by 2028.

The traffic homework

A 107-page independent traffic study already looked at the plan and, refreshingly, came back with a shrug: minimal delays at peak, fixable with a longer left-turn lane and a couple of flashing yellow arrows. The new mobility study goes bigger, covering port property, nearby neighborhoods, and downtown, so growth doesn't come at the expense of the people who actually live there.

The context is a port bracing for a record 3.9 million cruise passengers in 2026. That's a lot of luggage, a lot of margarita orders, and apparently a lot of turn-lane engineering.

Bottom line: if you sail out of Galveston, your embarkation day may eventually get a little less chaotic. In cruise-port years, "by 2028" is practically tomorrow.