Galloping Gertie

Right on the advertised….

By serial catowner on February 28, 2008

….according to Daimajin at Seattle Transit Blog, Bainbridge wants more passenger ferries.

But why would they want that? The half-hour crossing is barely long enough to grab a donut and a cup of coffee as it is.

Maybe it has something to do with the time it takes to load and unload the cars, reducing the frequency of the sailings. Maybe merchants in Bainbridge would like more customers without more cars. Maybe the passengers think a different place would be more convenient for foot passengers to load and unload. Or maybe they think passenger ferries would be faster.

The cheapest way to meet this demand is to quadruple the speed with which passengers can embark and disembark, only load as many vehicles as can be loaded while passengers get off and on, and double the frequency of the sailings.

But, before we can try that, we’ll have to try everything else first. It’s just the way we do things around here.

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A Short Note on Split Shifts

By serial catowner on February 23, 2008

The first job I had was a split shift. I think it’s safe to say most people don’t find this a convenient schedule to work.

And because commuting traffic has two big spikes, split shifts are a big headache in providing transit. Driving a bus, a train, or a ferry isn’t like waiting on table at the college cafeteria- the people who drive our transit vehicles are highly skilled, and, once qualified for their routes, hard to replace.

Highly skilled and hard-to-replace workers in our society expect and usually get health care benefits, sick days, vacations and so forth. This, combined with the morning and evening surges of transit, means that marginal services are expensive. If your traffic load doubles or triples during the rush hour and you need lots of bus drivers working split shifts, you may not be making a profit on the huge demand.

In some countries you can overload the bus by 30%, refuse to pay the driver extra and not provide any benefits, and live with the service shortfalls and accidents. This is why BRT that works in South America might not work here.

This is also why WSF has so much trouble with passenger ferries- they can’t reach an agreement with the Inland Boatmen’s Union about split shifts.

Like the suspension or the driveshaft of the bus, this is an issue that usually hides below the floor of a transit discussion. But it’s never very far below the floor.

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