In a tumultous week Washingtonians learned that this bastion of Democratism had received a mere crumb of ferry funding, and then a day later, our Senators happily reported that they had secured $7.6 million in funding, including $2.6 million for a Bremerton-Seattle fast ferry. This last might actually not be such a bad idea, but Fred Jarrett suggested that expanding the efforts of King County to run passenger-only ferries should be suspended.
There really can’t be many forms of public transit more expensive or harder to do right than “high speed” passenger-only ferries. The whole idea has such allure that it should probably be studied forever to satisfy the popular desire, but implementation should be rare.
Commuter ferries need skilled labor to work split shifts. High speed boats, in addition to being unreliable and very expensive to run, can’t carry amenities like snack bars. Water has the virtue of being level, and the drawback of being incompressible, making it expensive to push boat hulls through it. And these are just the problems you deal with all the time, to which are added storms, collisions, and tides.
The best solution is to use a large boat with a large passenger deck, running frequently at normal speeds. This makes the loading and unloading areas for the boat more important, and enhances the ability to develop connecting bus services.
Washington has a number of larger ferries with great passenger capacity which are full to the brim for a few runs each morning and night. The problem with these ferries is that they also carry cars, and those who know me can trust that I will turn to those problems in a future post, but for now one fo the best things you can say about “fast” passenger ferries is that they may forestall the paving of larger car holding areas and the building of larger car-carrying boats. And that’s not enough.
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