crosscut.com : Ferries

Sausage Links, "freedom to get drunk and blow stuff up" edition

Crosscut — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:23:01 PDT

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.

Sailing into oblivion

Crosscut — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 08:00:01 PDT

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.

Memo to our sinking ferries: Think bold!

Crosscut — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:00:01 PDT

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?

At City Hall, a showdown over historic preservation

Crosscut — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:00:01 PDT

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.

Traffic's so bad, we might actually be willing to pay a toll

Crosscut — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:00:01 PST

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.

Smaller ferries in Admiralty Inlet would be dangerous

Crosscut — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:37:01 PST

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:

Give foot ferries the boot

Crosscut — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:57:01 PST

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.

The Border Patrol swoops in on a domestic ferry run

Crosscut — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:00:01 PST

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.

Should King County be in the ferry business again?

Crosscut — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:00:01 PST

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.

Season's greeting from the â�� 17th century?

Crosscut — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:29:01 PST

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.

Thinking small about transit, after Prop 1's defeat

Crosscut — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:32:01 PST

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.

No ferry tale endings in this fleet

Crosscut — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:00:01 PST

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".

It's a miracle! King County finds money for ferries

Crosscut — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:00:01 PST

King County's leap into the ferry business makes sense politically, maintaining a passenger-only service being abandoned by the state. The big winner is King County Councilmember Dow Constantine, whose district includes West Seattle and Vashon Island. But from one perspective, this news is a head slapper.

The unseemly scramble for freed-up taxes, post-Proposition 1

Crosscut — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:00:01 PST

Defeat Proposition 1, as happened last week, and you leave a lot of taxing authority on the table. Not surprisingly, local governments are pouncing. Their greediness perhaps got out of hand this week, with the Metropolitan King County Council launching a county ferry system, jacking up bus fares, and wading into programs to rebuild levees and help mental health. In what's called "Tax Hike Tuesday," the Port of Seattle also got into the frenzy, approving a $78 million property tax levy, in a kind of premature celebration of the likely departure of its one anti-tax commissioner, Alec Fisken, who appears to have been defeated. Grab it now, was the mantra.

Those amazing rock 'n' roll ferry pictures

Crosscut — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:50:01 PDT

We finally know who shot those amazing photos of the Washington ferry plying rough seas near Mukilteo, Wash. — the pics that are bouncing all over the Internet via e-mail. The Kitsap Sun solved the mystery. The photographer was Ross Fotheringham of Everett. He says the photos were distributed without his authorization.

Putting on the Doggerel: All the news that's fin to print

Crosscut — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:00:01 PDT

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.

Beware of the feds bearing gifts

Crosscut — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 05:00:01 PDT

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.

In search of passenger-only ferry service that pencils out

Crosscut — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 00:00:01 PDT

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.

1. Highway tolls are inevitable in metro Puget Sound

Crosscut — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 23:00:01 PDT

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.

2. Avoiding a collision of transportation decisions

Crosscut — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 22:00:01 PDT

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.