Crosscut articles of the past 10 days with the most clicks.
Crosscut articles of the past 10 days with the most reader comments.
Posted Mon, Dec 15, 6 a.m.
The state makes it almost certain that ferry bids will come in way over budget, in a misguided attempt to keep the jobs in state. Here are the latest sad figures.
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Posted Tue, Sep 2, 2 a.m.
No less than the Washington State Investment Board, which oversees public pensions, is giving serious consideration to government-business partnerships to make infrastructure improvements. Experts identify several possibilities, including the Highway 520 bridge rebuild, I-5 across the Columbia River, and improvement of ferry service.
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Posted Sat, Jun 14, 8 a.m.
Seattle's last old Pacific schooner is about to be dismantled. The Wawona's impending "death" this summer offers a lesson in the challenges of maritime preservation. It's a tough end for a landmark ship that people have worked so hard for so long to save.
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Posted Wed, Mar 19, 10 p.m.
Trouble is brewing as critics and defenders of Seattle's landmarks process prepare to face off at a public meeting. Meanwhile, a lawsuit over the recent designation of a Ballard diner hangs over the debate.
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Posted Tue, Mar 4, 5 a.m.
Puget Sound policy-makers have been taking the public pulse. Their surveys reveal that people are generally pessimistic about the future, frustrated with traffic, and willing to pay to cross Lake Washington in a car – as long as it's really cheap.
READ MORE 14 COMMENTSPosted Fri, Feb 1, 3 p.m.
Last week, cars and passengers disembarking the San Juan Islands route at Anacortes were met by feds who inquired about everyone's citizenship. Normally, no big deal. But this checkpoint was for a boat that had not been to Canada. The government isn't saying much about it, but islanders are buzzing.
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Posted Fri, Dec 21, 8 a.m.
The county once before ran ferries, only to be rescued by the state. Now the state is too broke to keep the passenger boats running, and the county has got the bug again. It's expensive, there are other solutions, and Vashon Islanders were once dead set against passenger-only ferries. But hey, nostalgia springs eternal.
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Posted Thu, Sep 13, 1 p.m.
What do Paul Allen, a gray whale, and the Washington State Ferries have in common? They all displace a lot of water. Or two of them are running out of gas, and one of them is all gas. You decide.
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Posted Thu, Aug 16, 5 a.m.
New grants for congestion relief in Seattle and New York have big strings attached. And implementing road tolling is not as E-Z as it looks.
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Posted Thu, Jul 5, midnight
A 'return of the mosquito fleet' might make sense, but finding the right combination of public and private money to float a useful and economical service has proved elusive.
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Posted Sun, Jun 10, 11 p.m.
King County Executive Ron Sims has his own inconvenient truth to convey: Tolls are inevitable on all major Seattle-area freeways. And he already has a plan for us to discuss.
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Posted Sun, Jun 10, 10 p.m.
Mere talk about road tolls is seen as a threat to an unrelated $14.5 billion transportation ballot measure in November. That's why a proposal for widespread tolling has been secret until now.
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Posted Sun, Jun 10, 9 p.m.
Tolling and other measures are in use as congestion-reducers in London, Singapore, Rome, and many other places. There are a lot of ideas out there for Puget Sound planners to consider.
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Posted Sun, Jun 10, 6 p.m.
Crosscut would like you to weigh in after reading our special report, No Exit: Pay Toll Ahead by Dean Paton. Comment here on any or all of the five parts.
READ MORE 46 COMMENTSPosted Tue, May 29, midnight
The airwaves are awash in stories of the "news you can use" variety, meaning an endless and annoying stream of traffic and weather reports, mixed with consumer features that remind you to live the lifestyle of someone who religiously flips their mattresses every three months.
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Posted Fri, Aug 8, 5:01 a.m. 2008
Even though I'm a Washingtonian, if I had to choose between the Washington State Ferries (WSF) and the BC Ferries, the Canucks win by a kilometer. Granted, BC Ferries has had its share of mishaps. In 2006, the Queen of the North sunk while cruising the Inside Passage on its 18-hour journey between Port Hardy and Prince Rupert. One hundred and one passengers were on board, and two are still missing and presumed dead. Human error was blamed for the sinking. Two years later, the Queen of Oak Bay lost power and plowed through dozens of boats at a marina in West Vancouver while attempting to dock at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal.
MOREPosted Fri, Aug 1, 11:37 a.m. 2008
Plastic bag fees are so rive gauche. First, Seattle instated a 20-cent fee on disposable plastic bags. Then Portland decided to consider a similar idea. Now, the residents of Pullman say they want a bag fee, too. ...
MOREPosted Mon, Jul 28, 6:12 a.m. 2008
As a Whidbey Islander living in Langley, Wash., I won't be able to vote for the Sound Transit levy in November. But as somebody who uses mass transit whenever possible, I'm hoping it passes. I worked for Metro Transit three decades ago when voters turned down an important levy, one that could have changed the face of transportation in our region.
MOREPosted Mon, Jul 7, 1:23 p.m. 2008
Chris Mulick at the Tri-City Herald has today's top story, reporting this morning that Tim Eyman's Initiative 985 and the Service Employees International Union-backed Initiative 1029 would – if passed by voters in November – increase the state's budget deficit by an estimated $300 million.
MOREPosted Mon, May 19, 4 p.m. 2008
Over the weekend, The Seattle Times published a good overview of what ails our ferry system. Tim Eyman, by cutting the motor-vehicle tax, launched the first harpoon. Out of money, the ferry captains deferred maintenance and jacked up fares, sending usage downward.
The message seems to be: retrenchment. Maybe the opposite course makes more sense?
MOREPosted Wed, Feb 13, 3:37 p.m. 2008
A former NOAA officer, otherwise anonymous, has filed an interesting report about weather conditions in Admiralty Inlet, where the Port Townsend-Whidbey Island ferry route runs (when it does). His verdict: the state's plans to replace the current ferry with a smaller boat would risk lives, due to the mighty winds and waves prevalent in the area. The blogger describes, with detailed records, how the wind comes around the Olympics and creates intense pressure and high waves. That calls for boats that are "large, powerful, and sturdy," he writes. Here's his scary weather report:
MOREPosted Sun, Feb 10, 11:57 p.m. 2008
First, a compliment to Bruce Agnew of the Cascadia Center for Regional Development. The guy keeps pushing for new ideas in transportation, even when the rest of us are running away from the Heartbreak House of bold new ideas to solve our congestion. Cascadia wants to grab the Eastside rail line that might otherwise be torn up for a walking trail and make it into a Snohomish-to-Renton commuter rail line. (Cheap, but the line does not really go where the cities are.) The institute wants to solve the Alaskan Way Viaduct problem by boring a tunnel under Second Avenue, deflecting the through traffic so the waterfront only needs a modest surface boulevard. (Expensive, and needing a private partner, which alarms public-sector Democrats.) And now, a network of foot ferries on Puget Sound.
MOREPosted Sat, Dec 15, 7:29 p.m. 2007
Who would have thought that nearly a decade into the 21st century, downtown streetcars and the mosquito fleet would be making comebacks in Seattle? Instead of super-slick mag-lev mass transit, we'd be juicing up the old bus system, adding bike lanes and considering tearing down an elevated highway to replace it with a boulevard? In the holiday retail core, giant nutcracker soldiers stand guard outside of stores like cigar-store Indians of old. I guess they're cheaper than real cops: no overtime.
MOREPosted Wed, Nov 28, 10:32 a.m. 2007
The transit proposal du jour is for light-weight, single-car diesel trains running from Snohomish to Renton, along the old BNSF Railway's tracks. Those are the tracks the county and the Port want to turn into a trail and bikeway. Price for the small trains route would be somewhere between $125 million and $300 million, according to various estimates. The idea is the latest outbreak of thinking small about transit, in the wake of the rejection of Proposition 1. It's the spirit of Portland, stitching together small opportunities in transit as they come along -- trolleys, streetcars, bus malls, commuter rail on freight lines, and passenger ferries. You might call this TOY, for Transit of Yore, since most of the proposals are for nostalgic modes and tiny solutions.
MOREPosted Wed, Nov 21, 10 a.m. 2007
The surprise pre-Thanksgiving yanking of the last two of the old "Steel Electric" boats in the Washington ferry system – the Klickitat and the Illahee – might mean the end for some venerable old friends. The aging ferries have deteriorating hulls. Earlier this fall, the two others in the fleet, the Nisqually and the Quinault – were pulled from service due to corrosion bad enough that the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, critical of the ferry system's slowness to replace the vessels, dubbed the ferries "Washington state's Titanic".
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