By serial catowner on March 11, 2008
Another survey! This time about ferry riders!
You might wonder what it is we don’t know about ferry riders. We record the payment of fares, they buy coffee and croissants, they have representatives at the city, county, and state level who, uh, represent them, and newspapers who thunder.
At least, I’m wondering, and a look at the link provided didn’t make it any clearer. So far, countless person hours have been expended funding the survey, specifying what it will survey (well, duh, ferry patrons), finding the survey company, and specifying that everybody already involved in offering opinions will be involved in the future. All provided in unhelpful not-so-easy to read PDF format.
Washington State government loves to tell you that you are a stakeholder. Meanwhile, one year we don’t need any new ferries, and the next year, we need four or five.
Wonder if they did a survey to discover that? I’m guessing no, and that the new survey is, same as the old survey, just a smokescreen to conceal the real politics involved.
Posted in streetcars, System Map
By serial catowner on February 26, 2008
I recently began studying the ridership and appropriations of the Washington State ferries, and that was a little bit interesting. However, I soon realized that the big picture simply crushes the nuanced analysis.
One part of the big picture is that there will always be strong lobbying for more and larger car ferries. These people don’t need any help from me and they probably don’t need any help from you.
Another part of the big picture is that, for reasons I may elaborate in a future post, passenger ferries in Puget Sound will always be big money-losers. If you’re a casino and can make up the loss in some other way, or if you’re wealthy and can join other wealthy commuters in hiring a private boat, fine and dandy. Public authorities, however, will always struggle and frequently fail in dealing with the financial bleeding.
For the reader, it’s a happy ending- there’s not much you can do, and not much you should do, about the ferries. It’s an island of calm in a busy world.
Posted in cars, System Map
By serial catowner on February 14, 2008
Thirty years ago I considered buying an old passenger ferry that, in her day, was notorious for speed in carrying workers from West Seattle to Bremerton. She was 80 feet long, 12 feet wide, and, when I saw her, powered by one flathead Chrysler straight-eight, the same motor Chrysler used in their automobiles in the late forties and early fifties.
Moving passengers by water quickly will never be as efficient as rail, but water has a few advantages, first, that it is flat, and secondly, that it is free. Except for the terminals, you don’t condemn and buy property to set up a route on water, and each terminal can serve many routes.
Bruce Agnew has offered an excellent precis view here and I have critiqued Brewster’s response in a comment to Frank’s post, below. What I offer here is a tale of two cities.
In Bremerton, Cary Brozeman has led efforts to revitalize downtown Bremerton by replacing ferry parking with condominiums and commercial development, along with a stunning esplanade well worth a day trip from Seattle to admire, and a subway tunnel for cars and trucks exiting the ferry to pass under the city center before emerging on the surface. When the ferry arrives in the afternoon, a dozen buses swallow the foot passengers and carry them away. The Naval Shipyard, with less success in ameliorating traffic, also subsidizes bus service for their workers.
Bainbridge, while equally successful in developing dense foot-and-transit friendly housing, and picking up foot passengers with buses, has suffered from the WSDOT policy of dumping car and truck traffic from the ferry on local roads. In a car exiting the ferry in the afternoon, it takes as long to get from Bainbridge to Poulsbo as it did to cross the Sound, not too impressive when we consider that the distances are the same. Bainbridge and Kingston are suffering, and know they are suffering, from the cars and trucks dumped on them by WSDOT.
Yes, in the past our regional governances have been divided and conquered by savvy power brokers and their tools at WSDOT. It’s time to change all of that.
Posted in addictive, automobiles, Bus Stop, cars, System Map
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