Paul Greene is Director of the Washington State Ferry System
By Paul Greene
Published: August, 2000
Paul Greene is Director of the Washington State Ferry System
Our Seattle-area ferries are a top tourist attraction, and like the Space Needle, a true icon of the Northwest. They connect the people of the Puget Sound region to jobs, bring goods to markets, and provide services to all within a major metropolitan area. The WSF spends a large part of the day taking people to and from work in Seattle and to other places like the Bremerton Shipyard. For the communities on Vashon Island and the San Juan Islands, the ferries provide the only link for vehicles to the mainland. The WFS system operates both as an extension of the state’s highway system and as a highly efficient provider of mass transportation.
Washington State Ferries operates 20 terminals, 24 vehicle/passenger ferries, and five (5) passenger-only ferries. Included in these numbers are the latest additions: two high-speed passenger-only vessels from Dakota Creek Shipyards that carry 350 passengers at 36 knots and three Jumbo Mark II vehicle/passenger ferries, constructed at Todd Pacific Shipyards, with a service speed of 18 knots, that carry 2,500 passengers and 218 vehicles.
Both vehicle and passenger ridership is projected to grow faster than the general population. Over the next 20 years, the population of the four county central Puget Sound metropolitan region is projected to increase by more than 2 million residents. Traffic on certain routes within the central Puget Sound corridor is expected to more than double. WSF expects that daily demand for ferry travel will increase by an average of 70 percent by 2015.
The Kitsap Peninsula and the islands on the west side of Puget Sound are primarily residential, while Seattle is the employment attraction. This imbalance will persist over the next 20 years putting enormous pressure on during peak periods and causing capacity pressure, as well as schedule reliability pressure, for customers commuting to and from work. WSF anticipates that the walk-on percent of traffic carried will increase from 41 percent to 55 percent in 2015. This will put more pressure on landside transit and parking infrastructure. The goals of the program are to take advantage of the development of high-speed passenger carrying technology to allow new, longer routes to become feasible and balance cross Sound traffic flows out over several routes instead of focusing on one or two high-density corridors. Also, the speed advantage is a further inducement to attracting commuters out of their automobiles into the walk-on mode of travel.
Issues that the Washington Ferry System Faces
Environmental Permitting
There are increasing levels of regulations that affect most every facet of ferry business: landside regulations in the form of federal transportation planning rules; state growth-management rules requiring conformance to regional transportation plans; the vast array of local regulations governing land use, transportation and traffic, and building permits; and federal and state environmental regulations and state and local shoreline permitting processes involving multiple agencies often with conflicting goals. Furthermore, in addition to the Coast Guard, the WSF must work with two other organizations (Labor & Industries and Ecology) that have regulatory powers over WSF’s vessels.
WSF has used key environmental/design consultants such as CH2M HILL to weave through the planning and landside permit process, which is much more complex than vessel permitting. As with any ferry service, WSF, depends on landside facilities and their accessibility to customers, whether it is via transit, vehicular or even pedestrian movements.
Safety
The WSF system has an established record of safety, having never experienced a passenger fatality in our 49 years of operation. But as we all know, other ferry operators throughout the world do not share this level of passenger safety. Washington State Transportation Commission and the State legislature formed a Blue Ribbon Panel on Ferry Safety, which resulted in a detailed computer-based risk assessment model and 16 recommended action items. WSF is in various stages of implementing those recommendations that focus on elements of improved risk reduction and emergency response.
Those efforts include:
» Establishment of a 7-days-a-week, 24-hour-a-day Watch Center with the appropriate communications suite.
» Capability to monitor the position of all our vessels.
» Establishment of emergency response teams trained in Incident Command System procedures outreach initiative to all Emergency Response providers in the Northwest.
Customer Service
The ferry business is a customer service business. One way WSF assesses success is through the collection and analysis of comments made by our customers. In 1999, WSF received less than 10 complaints per 100,000 riders.
Like every other business, the Internet is becoming an essential tool to fulfilling customers’ expectations. In addition to providing WSF’s schedule, fares, expected boarding wait times, and a real-time depiction of where our in-service vessels are, the Internet provides the platform for our schedule disruption e-mail notification system. This system provides the 5,000-plus subscribers with real-time notification of a delay or disruption on the routes in which they are interested. . With palmcorders and digital read-out pagers, the communication capability can be as close as their briefcase, purse, or hip.
Operating Performance
Second only to safety, schedule reliability is the most important element in WSF’s service. Over the past 5 years, WSF has completed more than 99.4% of our scheduled 744,000 trips.
On-time performance continues to grow in importance as more customers make the modal shift out of automobiles. WSF has made on-time performance a fleet priority, but we are just beginning to get the necessary technology in place to capture and analyze this data in the same fashion as schedule completion.
Financial Responsibility
The recent approval of ballot measure 695 drastically changed the financial reality for WSF, creating even more pressure to be financially efficient. Over the next 6 years, the motor vehicle excise tax would have represented 25 percent of WSF’s operating revenues, leaving a $254 million gap. The capital picture is worse. The motor vehicle excise tax was to account for 77 percent of WSF capital revenue over 6 years, or a $614 million hole in the capital budget.
Yet consider how lean WSF service already is. Over the last 6 years, WSF carried 3 million new passengers and 1.5 million additional vehicles while reducing operating costs per passenger and per vehicle. Overall, the ferry system has a fair box recovery of 60 percent of operating cost. In comparison, most public transportation systems recover less than 30 percent of operating expenses.
On average, WSF’s vessels are 30 years old and many of the terminals are over 40. A 20-year capital requirements analysis showed a need for $2.5 billion. With respect to managing capital, WSF has implemented a two-pronged initiative. The first involves a comprehensive life-cycle analysis program for both vessels and terminals to guide our preservation investments and ensure priority terminal structures and vessel systems are replaced when they reach the end of their life expectancies. The second is a concerted effort to improve vessel and terminal contract management.
The capital picture is worse. The motor vehicle excise tax accounted for 77 percent of our capital revenue over 6 years. Initiative 695 created a $614 million hole in our capital budget. As a matter of fact, we do not have enough capital funds remaining to cover our existing debt obligations.
During their most recent session, the Washington State legislature funded most of our capital and operating needs for the balance of this budget cycle which ends on June 30, 2001.
However, the future of the ferry system beyond that date depends on the legislature finding a permanent funding solution. To that end, a legislatively mandated task force has been created to evaluate and recommend alternatives to this funding crisis. Their report is due to lawmakers in Olympia next January.
For as bleak as our future may appear, I believe our elected officials will find the resolve to address this problem. Washington State Ferries is too important to our state and the Seattle region in particular to expect any less.
Long a vital means of transportation in areas with major lakes, bays and sounds, ferry travel is re-emerging once again as a major link in our nation’s transportation system. Bridges in the late 1800’s and much of the 1900’s replaced many ferry operations. Recently, ferry travel has seen a resurgence as the nation’s population has grown and land based transportation systems have become increasingly congested. The development of fast ferry technology enables much more creative deployment of vessels to provide viable alternatives to clogged landside roads and mass transit systems.
More than ever, ferry transportation plays a vital role in this country’s economic framework. More than ever, ferry transportation is an effective and efficient means of moving large numbers of people. And ferry transportation is as vital now as it was 100 years ago when the mosquito fleet first plied the waters of Washington state.
