The Commute

Now that the first new 64-car ferry has been named, along with the class of ferries it will be part of, it’s time to name the second ferry now that Todd Shipyards is starting to build it. The state Transportation Commission, which oversees naming things, has established some guidelines.

Last fall, it approved naming the first ferry “Chetzemoka” after the S’Klallam chief. A ferry had also been named that in the old days. Then a fourth-grade class at Port Townsend’s Blue Heron Middle School (yeah, they have fourth-graders there; I looked it up), named the new class of ferries Kwa-di Tabil class, which means “little boat” in Quileute.

Then the Island County Historical Society and Swinomish Tribe touted the name “Squi qui” for the second boat. Squi qui was a key figure in the Lower Skagit Tribe that occupied central Whidbey Island in the mid-1800s. I think that’s why the Transportation Commission came out with some guidelines.

They include:

Carry statewide significance and repesent the state’s image and culture.

Represent such things as state symbols, tribal names, bodies of water, geographic locations, cities, counties or relate to nautical heritage.

Consistency with existing WSF fleet names.

Have broad familiarity, be easy to pronounce (can you say Kwa-di Tabil?) and not be offensive.

You can submit suggestions until April 30. After that, there will be a review and public comment process. Final selection will be during the commission’s July 13-14 meeting in Olympia.

For more about ferry naming, go here.

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That was the question asked recently of members of the Ferry Riders Opinion Group (FROG), which wants to get input from as many folks as possible. You can sign up at www.ferryridersopiniongroup.com/public.

Anyway, 40 percent of ferry riders said they’d want all state taxpayers to foot the bill by shifting more gas tax revenue to the ferries. That would require taking money dedicated to highway projects or maintenance, or increasing the tax on gas. Eleven percent said they’ve be willing to pay a surcharge to cover it, and 8 percent said they’d be OK with a combination of a surcharge, fares and state subside increases.

I could maybe imagine a fuel surcharge if diesel prices out of nowhere rocketed past $4 a gallon like a few years ago. But this biennium that we’re in the middle of, Washington State Ferries budgeted about $30 million too low. Somebody just blew it, whether it was ferry people or the the oil price soothsayers that the use. If they would have budgeted more realistically, there would have been enough money available, so I wouldn’t put that on the riders.

There was talk that a surcharge could go into effect on May 1 to cover that deficit, but now it looks like the Legislature will take care of it in the supplemental budget. I think they’re also going to pass something that directs WSF to use more than one soothsayer when predicting future fuel prices.

And everyone, go sign up for FROG and make your opinions known.

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Washington State Ferries’ new ferry Chetzemoka was placed in the water last week. Work began in July and the 64-car ferry should be running between Port Townsend and Keyport this summer. Here are some photos from DOT.

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It’s hard to envision a passenger ferry with sails, but it makes some sense. A guy in California is hoping to sell ferry companies in the Bay Area on the idea, according to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Jay Gardner, with Wind+Wing Technologies, says it would cost between $3 million and $9 million to build a wind-assisted” ferry and it would cut fuel use by at least 40 percent.

The sails aren’t like the canvas ones on a regular sailboat but are made fo carbon composite materials and are more like airplane wings.

There’s another company in Australia, Solar Sailor, that makes ferries with sails covered in solar panels. That way, while the ferry is stopped, as it often is, it’s still generating power.

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A story in The News Tribune last week talked about all of the cutting Pierce Transit will have to do if it doesn’t get more revenue. That could be in the form of a three-tenths of 1 percent increase in local sales tax, provided voters go for it. Fortunately, we’ve already been through this with Kitsap Transit. It’s the same story.

Nobody’s spending, so sales taxes are tanked. Sales taxes make up about 70 percent of operating costs for both Pierce and Kitsap transits. If Pierce has to stick with its current revenue, it might have to cut all but its core service. That means no more buses in Gig Harbor, Steilacoom, Northeast Tacoma and the East County, the paper quotes chief executive Lynne Griffith as saying. The agency would reduce the number of bus routes from 51 to 23 and the annual service hours from 622,000 to 265,000. Ouch.

They’ll be having a bunch of public meetings to get feedback beginning this month and decide how to proceed this summer.

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The Chelan got a much-needed exterior topside paint job during its recent drydock at Todd Pacific Shipyards. There are some nice before-and-after shots here. What was all rusty orange is now shiny white.

Next, the car deck will be painted, but that won’t happen until later. It’s going back to the Anacortes-San Juan Islands route on Monday.

The Hyak, which frequently runs on the Bremerton route, and Yakima are in dire need of paint jobs. The Yakima will get a partial topside coating when it goes into maintenance in March, but the Hyak will have to wait until November to get its partial topside coating.

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Washington State Ferries has launched a new and improved Vessel Watch tool on its Web page. A Beta version, it’s a work in progress, but already cooler than its primitive but useful predecessor.
The new Vessel Watch pretty much does the same thing as the old, but better. They’re both basically maps with little icons representing the boats so you can see which ones are on a route and where they are at the moment.
The new map is more detailed and looks a lot nicer, which doesn’t really add to its functionality, but you can zoom in and out, which you can’t on the old one. Every few seconds you can see the new boat icons move across the water, like green jumping beans. It uses GPS coordinates from the boats’ transponders. On the old map, you had to hit the refresh button for the little blue arrows to move to their approximate locations.
They’re still working on some advanced features. If you click on a boat, a screen pops up with slots for next departure, estimated arrival time, heading, speed, longitude and latitude. Today, only the heading is working. I’m pretty sure the latitude and longitude were there when I looked a few days ago. The next departure time is supposed to be available by the end of the month.

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Moments after posting about the Senate transportation budget not including a ferry fuel surcharge, I got a story from the Associated Press that the House had released its transpo budget.

I looked into it, and here are some key points for ferries.

It would spend $27 million to cover the cost of diesel prices that were higher than what they were budgeted.

It would defer implementing a ferry fuel surcharge. That policy would be re-evaluated after looking into ways to conserve fuel and reduce the effect of price volatility on the fuel budget.

It continues to support the building of three 64-car ferries and provides an additional $8.45 million to finalize the detailed design for the 144-car ferries.

It provides funding to develop a reservation system.

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There’s been some confusion about whether a ferry fuel surcharge in the Senate’s transportation budget. It’s not very clear in the budget language itself, so I talked to Senate staff and they said no. The ferries are fully funded in their budget through this budget period, which ends on June 30, 2011. So there will be no surcharge before then. There is language in the bill that authorizes Washington State Ferries to set up the mechanism for a surcharge that it can use if necessary in the future.

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Ann Erickson, chairwoman of the Bremerton Ferry Advisory Committee, e-mailed a letter to the editor on Jan. 29 lamenting changes to the ferry advisory committees contained within Senate Bill 6109. Much changed between then and when the letter ran in the paper on Feb. 6. All mention of the committees was removed from the bill, according to Chris Mulick, spokesman for the Senate Democrats.
“I’m told that the ferry bill doesn’t do anything to impact the Ferry Advisory Committee,” he wrote on Feb. 1. “That’s not to say that won’t change. but as of this moment in time, there is no impact. Or so I’m told.”
The bill is a hodgepodge of all things ferries. That had included the FAC changes. Erickson was upset that it would have eliminated the direct relationship between the FACs and Washington State Ferries. Instead, the FACs would work through local governments.
It would have eliminated the semi-annual public meetings. WSF would have meet with local governments instead. It would have eliminated the FAC executive council, comprising the chairs of each FAC. They meet every other month with WSF. And it would have required local officials to serve on FACs and constrain who local officials could assign to the FACs.
This makes little sense because the FACs have been doing a good job of working with the ferry system and local governments already have too much to do and wouldn’t have been eager to carry out another responsibility.
The bill remains alive in the Senate, without the FAC stuff.

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