Orphan Road

An alarming thing can happen to a mild-mannered transit advocate when they hear the word ‘ferry’. Suddenly they go all Robert Moses on you, demanding superferries, super terminals, and super highways to encourage sprawl on the west side of Puget Sound. As for what the locals may think of all this, why, they must not be allowed to stand in the way of this vital economic development of our historic destiny, and so forth and so on.

Things get even worse when the subject is the passenger-only ferry (POF). The mild dislike that tempers enthusiasm for the car ferry is cast aside, along with every truism of responsible development of transit. Now we’re assured that the new boats (this discussion never involves the old boats that actually did the job quite well) will be fast and, if that’s not enough, modern.

In vain to point out that there are established passenger services on the ferries connecting to well-planned bus connections serving existing communities. That kind of old-fashioned thinking might serve to justify spending $100 million taking transit right into Bellevue, but is quite unsuited for thinking about POFs, which could open new parts of the West Sound to development. You might think that future Westsounders would locate near existing transit if it was light rail, but imagining they might locate to ride as passengers on a car ferry, as so many do already, is quite impossible.

By now our former Dr Transit, now Mr Ferry, usually has a full head of steam, and launches into a florid and mildly delusional description of the trips they might take, once or twice a year, if only a POF served those routes. Yes, it would be romantic, but, for that matter, a long bus trip is also romantic, if you only do it once or twice a year.

At this point, there is no Dr Transit- it’s all Mr Ferry. Bleeding Kitsap’s transit budget with money-losing ferry routes becomes a good thing, sprawl becomes ‘development’, and the rider of the POF should thank their lucky stars that they can now pay three times as much for their journey, because it’s fast and modern.

Are you a Dr Transit, or a Mr Ferry? Before you answer, grab a copy of Gordon Newall’s Ships of the Inland Sea and spend a weekend meeting the way-it-was. For a very moderate price you can spend a few hours of that on the Bremerton boat, with tasty snacks and a sculpture park in Bremerton making a layover there worthwhile. Mix what you learn with modern principles of public transit, and top it off with a look at the Staten Island ferry.

New York could have built their modern boats in a different shape, but chose to maintain their heritage. There’s a lesson in there, someplace.

In a sense it’s a darned shame the transit to the eastside is moving so fast. In a short time (as these things go) public opinion would support twice as much transit for the same money.

This seeming miracle, of course, would be accomplished by using the land and right-of-way the public already owns. There’s no question that that land has been vetted for public transportation, and surely the environmental studies could largely re-use the work that was previously done.

Imagine, if you will, a line running east from Ballard to
Redmond over the Evergreen Point bridge, and another running east from the ID to Issaquah- the two intersected by a belt line on the old BNSF Renton to Woodinville line.

This leaves Bellevue west of the line, but, not to worry, Bellevue will shift east if this line were built, as witness this recent article in the Seattle P-I. Similarly, in Kirkland and further north are large parcels, formerly served by the rail line, and held by investors waiting to see what happens.

By this point some STB readers will be blowing their safety valves. Don’t worry- the chances that building the line would involve using a route where all the major earthmoving had already been done are about zero. You’ll get your massively expanded Park ‘n Ride on the Mercer Slough. And, as with almost every transit system in the world, the currently proposed line will stand forever as a visible-from-space testimonial to the power of deal-making.