Ferry schedule meeting set for Wednesday in West Seattle

Free shuttle service to the meeting is available

Washington State Ferries will release its proposed schedule for the triangle route at a meeting set for 4:30 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 12, at Fauntleroy Church in West Seattle.

Ferry officials have been working on the schedule for months and received more than 300 comments after their last draft, which reduced service from Vashon to Fauntleroy, particularly in the evening.

The meeting is expected to be islanders’ last chance to speak up about what they like or do not like about the schedule, slated to go into effect in March. The meeting will be a working meeting for WSF, representatives of the Triangle Route Improvement Task Force and the three advisory committees from communities the route serves. Public comment will be allowed at the end of the meeting, according to WSF spokeswoman Hadley Rodero.

Islanders Steve Stockett and Rick Wallace have been working hard in recent months, trying to get WSF to consider a so-called pendulum schedule, with vessels rotating among the stops on the route on a regular basis throughout the day. WSF has declined to pursue that idea, but Stockett and Wallace have remained engaged on ferry issues. Last week, with several other islanders, they arranged for school buses to shuttle people to the meeting and back to the island.

They set up a website, vashonsonlyroad.org, which lists their concerns about the most recent proposed schedule, including that WSF ignored a solution that would have better served all three communities and ignored the possible economic impact of the schedule on the island as well as public safety concerns.

Wallace, Stockett and other supporters are asking that WSF delay the proposed schedule and revise the schedule to better serve all Triangle Route communities.

“Our objective is to make sure WSF understands we are not invisible,” Wallace said last week. “We will be involved as a community. We are not going away, even though they have only given lip service to a true solution to the problems on the triangle route.”

People in interested in taking a bus should should meet at the Chamber of Commerce parking lot (17141 Vashon Highway SW, across from Ober Park) Wednesday afternoon. Depatures are planned for around 2:30 p.m. and 2:50 p.m. to catch the 3:25 p.m. ferry.

Fauntleroy Church is located at 9140 California Ave. SW, just a short distance from the Fauntleroy ferry.