Ferry service: Wait times will tell

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Public attendance at the Dec. 12 Triangle Route schedule meeting must have surprised WSF; the venue and the PA system were inadequate. Introductory remarks by WSF Strategic Communications Manager Hadley Rodero also seemed to express surprise that so many had mobilized so late in the game to comment. I wasn’t surprised. I’ve been aware of WSF’s struggles to integrate collaborative input from analysts/activists/citizens. After hearing Rodero, I feel compelled to share my journey:

November 2017: Dedicated ferry activist Kathy Abascal told me that WSF planned a new schedule. Thinking about the schedule, I came to three crucial insights, which immediately led to a schedule model that former Triangle Route Improvement Task Force member Hugh Turner would later label “pendulum.” I shared the pendulum with the WSF service manager. No reply.

January 2018: With Jeremy Cooper, I co-authored a study (Cooper/Eicher 2018) that detailed the pendulum. We used WSF’s data to compare the pendulum to the status quo and outlined a new dock-loading scheme. In sharing the study with WSF long before we publicized it, we offered to discuss our findings. WSF Director of Government Relations John Vezina replied that he appreciated our availability to discuss “the proposal” and never contacted us again. We subsequently published the study in The Seattle Times and The Beachcomber.

April 2018: I learned Sen. Sharon Nelson had arranged taxpayer funds ($75,000) to support a UW Evans School study of Fauntleroy. I called immediately to offer support or commentary. Seven month later, just before completion, the authors invited me to chat about Fauntleroy in general; they could not share any of their work or findings except tell me that they were tasked not to study the schedule or dock size. I believe asking high-powered UW researchers to examine Fauntleroy solutions without permitting them to examine the schedule/dock is a waste of tax dollars. It’s like asking an economist to fix a budget deficit without showing her two-thirds of the budget.

October 2018: At the WSF schedule open house, Vezina (not knowing who I was) explained to me the pendulum with some inaccuracies. He then referred me to Justin Resnick, WSF’s schedule planner, who explained to me that the “30-minute-departure-interval” was Cooper/Eicher pendulum’s “fatal flaw.” I mentioned that Cooper/Eicher hand-timed dock traffic to verify the departure interval’s feasibility. Resnick called over the WSF’s Fauntleroy dock manager, who confirmed Cooper/Eicher’s loading times as feasible.

Resnick then explained a recent WSF “policy change” now required 35-minute departure intervals. Cooper/Eicher mentioned explicitly that the pendulum model is flexible to allow for longer departure intervals, but Resnick was unaware. (In the interim, Stockett/Wallace publicized a fully fleshed out version of the 35-minute pendulum schedule. Stockett/Wallace apparently asked WSF more than a dozen times to discuss the 35-minute pendulum.)

Finally, I alerted Resnick that his own proposed schedule violates WSF’s “new policy.” His schedule featured several 15-, 20-, 25- and 30-minute-departure intervals during rush hour. Resnick admitted that his four departures after 2:45 p.m. could never occur on time and/or be full, but he insisted ferries would “eventually catch up with the schedule.” The takeaway: WSF’s schedule can violate WSF’s “new policy,” but the pendulum cannot.

In summary, I found WSF to be information resistant. This entire saga (closed bypass lane, scanner malfunctions, false dock pilot evaluation, loading trials not being evaluated) seems like a case study of public officials’ reticence to interact with the very constituents they serve (and who pay their wages). I think since WSF public officials are not accountable to their constituents, but only to the Legislature, WSF has proven collaboration averse.

My new mantra is: “Wait Times Will Tell.” In what I believe is frightening planning faux pas, the PDF of WSF’s proposed schedule neglects to reference any evaluation criteria, and the implementation timeline shows no evaluation period. This conjures up memories of the false May 2017 pilot evaluation and absent 2017 trial evaluation that resulted in forced stops at the ticket booth.

It is the Legislature that evaluates WSF by on-time performance, but not full ferries, nor wait times. So WSF is caught between filling the boats to provide ferry service and appeasing the regulators who demand punctuality. Cooper/Eicher document that this leads to revenues losses and longer wait times. And while capacity utilization on ferries and wait times are worse than ever, total triangle ridership in 2018 is still below levels observed in the early 2000s. That’s how we know the story about Southworth is a distraction: The gridlock isn’t caused by Southworth traffic increases — it is caused by suboptimal operations.

If the Legislature doesn’t focus on monitoring of ferry capacity and wait times to minimize revenue losses, why should WSF? The next platoon of protest buses should thus depart off the south end to visit the Joint Transportation Committee and highlight that Olympia’s incomplete WSF evaluation criteria produce wrong loading/departure procedures and wrong schedules. On the upside, long wait times on Vashon can now translate into fantastic food at the Wild Mermaid.

— Theo Eicher (te@uw.edu) is a professor of economics and uses the PO boat to ride his bike to the University of Washington.