COMMENTARY: As ferries move to restore cuts, speak up, Vashon

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, June 1, 2022

Three years after Washington State Ferries (WSF) revised the Triangle Route schedule, ferry officials say it was a job well done and that regular riders are pleased with the schedule.

While the Fauntleroy rush hour problems have lessened – a fact helped by reduced traffic during the pandemic – our evening schedule has become problematic, with direct sailings from Vashon to Fauntleroy cut in half. As WSF moves to restore pandemic-era cuts to service, I hope you will join me in asking Gov. Jay Inslee to listen to islanders and reinstate our evening access to the mainland.

The schedule, implemented in 2019, created egregious travel obstacles and has wasted tax dollars. Currently, it reflects the cancellation of four direct ferry runs from Vashon to Fauntleroy between 6:40 and 10:05 p.m. Three runs were lost to the revised schedule and the fourth to the pandemic two-boat schedule.

At the time that ferry officials cut the three runs from Vashon to Fauntleroy, they added two sailings from Southworth to Fauntleroy. Those sailings completely bypass Vashon. In April, amid complaints, WSF began to allow vehicles and passengers to board the 8:15 p.m. sailing to Southworth, which then goes direct to Fauntleroy.

Traveling this circuitous route is only a small improvement for islanders, and more improvements are needed.

Gov. Inslee boasts that his administration is data-driven, but WSF dropped these weekday evening Vashon stops without official loading data. Recently, I made a public records request for the data WSF analyzed for the 2019 schedule revision. It revealed that WSF did not have Vashon vehicle or passenger data in any form except handwritten trip logs.

In fact, WSF’s public Tableau dashboard has a note on it: no data for terminals without scanners. That translates to bad news for Vashon: the car and passenger counts leaving the island are never officially tallied.

I went through the trip logs, and the data for May 2018 show that an average of 113 cars arrived or departed Vashon on the now-canceled ferries (7, 7:40, 8:30 and 8:45 p.m.) During these same dates and times, an average of only 39 cars left Southworth.

It is difficult to understand why WSF shut down Vashon service in the revised schedule when Vashon demand was nearly triple the demand at Southworth. With more evening sailings departing Southworth, and all of them now direct to Fauntleroy, you would think that vehicles moved on those Southworth runs would have increased significantly, but total ridership stayed the same, just spread across more sailings.

During October and November 2019, on average, 39 cars traveled from Southworth to Fauntleroy (direct) between 6:45 and 9:55 p.m. An average of eight cars filled each of these five ghost ferries. These ferries literally transported more crew than cars, while islanders could only watch those ferries sail by.

Bypassing the island comes at a cost to WSF. The pre-pandemic canceling of the three runs translates to missing out on the revenue from islanders’ trips not taken – a potential loss of $750,00 annually.

I recently presented WSF with the data and requested that all boats after 7 p.m. stop at Vashon. Unfortunately, WSF Assistant Secretary Patty Rubstello said it would require losing one sailing out of Fauntleroy, which she termed an “untenable option.”

Regardless, the schedule WSF created in 2019 reflects a decision to trade an entire boat’s worth of proven evening vehicle traffic leaving Vashon and move that capacity over to Fauntleroy, where capacity after 7 p.m. does not seem to be a problem, as every single sailing out of Fauntleroy between 7 and 8 p.m. (May 2020) was less than half full.

Magically, the “untenable option” seems to evaporate each weekend, when evening service does, in fact, follow the all-stops pattern, with all boats stopping at Vashon. There are three sailings from Vashon to Fauntleroy between 7 and 8:40 p.m., and no boats skip the island until 11 p.m. In fact, the weekend schedule, which is the all-stops route all day long, works well – that’s why they use it.

Moreover, there is a carbon cost to sailing past Vashon. I estimate that WSF emits 9 metric tons of carbon dioxide daily passing up willing customers. On top of that, boats that skip Vashon are able to sail more miles over the course of the day, burning more fuel than they would if they stopped at the island. At face value, our current schedule seems the complete opposite of what Gov. Inslee champions.

Regardless of the lens you use, at every decision point in evaluating the revised schedule, Vashon ended up under the bus, whether it’s weekday evening sailings, carbon footprint, metrics for Vashon sailings, maximizing the number of vehicles moved, revenue hit for local businesses when off islanders no longer visit, or lost ferry revenue.

What can we do about it? This is where you come in. Please take the time to fill in the survey at tinyurl.com/vj9pvxju, and I’ll make sure your input lands on the desk of Gov. Inslee. I say it’s high time we let Olympia know they can’t get our votes and leave us stranded on the island with poor ferry service.

– Jar Lyons lives in Gold Beach and designs software that companies rely on to make the most efficient use of their container ships.