Golf Cart Taxis: A Fight That's Already Happened on Pleasure Island
Golf cart taxi services — pay-per-ride, not per-day-rental — have shown up in beach towns across the country, and the regulatory fight over them isn't hypothetical here. It already happened on Pleasure Island.
What actually happened in Carolina Beach and Kure Beach
Back in 2018, a Carolina Beach rental operator running under the Sun Fun name (the company now operating as Sharky's Golf Cart Rentals) launched a golf cart taxi service — flat per-person fares for rides around town. Licensed taxi drivers filed complaints, arguing the golf cart taxis weren't following the same rules as traditional cabs — background checks, insurance requirements, meter regulations — while competing directly for the same rides. Port City Daily covered the dispute in detail, including the town's response: rather than tightening the rules on golf cart taxis, Carolina Beach moved to loosen regulations for all taxis, closing the gap by deregulating instead of adding restrictions.
The following year, Kure Beach's town council approved special use permits for golf cart rentals and taxi service, formally adding golf carts to the town's code of permitted uses. Both towns effectively decided golf cart taxis were a legitimate transportation category worth accommodating, not a loophole to close.
It's not just here
The same pattern has played out at the Jersey Shore. In Cape May, a business called Cape May Beach Buggy started in 2018 specifically as a nighttime taxi service before customers started asking to rent the carts themselves — the taxi business came first, the rental business grew out of demand for it. North Wildwood now requires an annual $400 permit for LSVs operating in that capacity. It's the same underlying tension in a different state: a low-speed vehicle that's genuinely useful for short paid rides in a walkable beach town, running up against a taxi regulatory framework that wasn't written with it in mind.
Where this leaves things now
The regulatory question in Carolina Beach and Kure Beach specifically has already been asked and answered — both towns chose accommodation over restriction. That's a meaningfully different environment than a town encountering this question for the first time. It doesn't mean every operator on the island runs a taxi service today, or that JellyCarts does — it means the path is already cleared here in a way it isn't everywhere.
Sources: Port City Daily, "Is there a double standard for Golf cart taxis in Carolina Beach?"; Port City Daily, "Golf cart rentals and taxis coming to Kure Beach"; The Philadelphia Inquirer on Jersey Shore golf cart taxis.