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.
Do you have any examples of this thinking in action?
You can find these types in this comment thread at Seattle Transit Blog.
Like it or not, places over in the West Sound are becoming bedroom communities for Seattle, so it’s better to serve them with ferries that go twice the speed and don’t use the incredible amount of fuel that car ferries do.
I work for WSF – I think a 40 (?) minute trip at a $15 suggested RT cost is just plain stupid…whether I could ride WSF for free or not. $75 / week x 4 = $300; then add the transit pass to get to work. Unless your employer subsidizes your transit pass — and that that transit pass covers the fare for the POF — it strikes me as non-cost effective.
Thank you for illustrating my point about Dr Transit becoming Mr Ferry. There is no point at all in going twice the speed and using more fuel per passenger-mile to do that. People who don’t want an hours commute to Bremerton can move to Bainbridge, which takes half an hour. We already own and operate these boats. The terminal facilities and connecting transit are already in place.
Building new POFs might take passengers off existing routes- the functional equivalent of building a rich-person only road to more distant suburbs that paralleled a light rail line. Keep that kind of thinking on the east side of the Sound, if you please.
Yes, we are doomed to see this experiment repeated again and again, because real estate development interests are always heavily represented on the County Councils. Most of us in the Westsound don’t want POFs and choose not to ride them.
Exactly- and this is especially true when we consider that most of the people on the Bremerton boat are either working, socializing, or sleeping- none of which can be comfortably done on the POF. It’s not as though you were actually losing the extra time you spend.
See, your solution is for the people to live closer to work, but like I said, that whole area is (sub)urbanizing, and like it or not, a ton of people do live in Bremerton and commute to Seattle, so it’s good to offer them a quicker way to get here.
For starters (and maybe I should just be doing another post), why would I want to encourage sprawl by giving people quicker ways to commute?
Probably 3/4 of the pedestrian commuters on Washington State Ferries are from Bainbridge, and Bainbridge has responded appropriately with a dense core development within walking distance of the ferries. This is exactly the kind of development I would like to see.
But the way to improve service for Bainbridge is not to offer faster ferries, but to offer more frequent ferries that do not increase the vehicular load on the island’s roads, that is to say, smaller car ferries than those currently planned.
Bremerton is entirely different- it’s basically a suburb with city limits. Almost all of the pedestrian riders from Bremerton live in suburban homes. This entire area is choked and polluted by suburban development and I have no interest at all in promoting that.
You seem to think that suburbanization “just happens” but that’s not true at all. When my parents moved to Bellevue Highway 10 (now I-90) had more capacity than the area could use. When 405 was widened from 2 lanes to 4, it was virtually empty. There was no “rush hour”. The roads were built by land developers in the state legislature. That’s true of virtually every limited-access road in the state. I spent many hours of my youth driving around on empty freeways because it was so incredible.
So the answer is, no, it’s not a good idea to “offer them a quicker way to get here”.