The Commute

Since there hasn’t been much happening in Kitsap lately, Larry and I decided to pop down to San Diego and jump on the USS John C. Stennis for her last leg home to Bremerton. We can’t tell you when that will be because it’s super secret. We don’t even know how long we’ll be away. The editors just said go and you’ll get here when you get here.

What I can tell you is we plan all kinds of good coverage of the ship’s recent deployment, the Tiger Cruise, what it’s like to live on an aircraft carrier and some of the characters.

We got in about 9:30 a.m. and the ship had already arrived. So it’s here and that much closer to getting all these guys and gals back home.

Charlotte Garrido, county commissioner and chairwoman of the Kitsap Transit board of directors, said Tuesday that the agency and service development director John Clauson have a verbal agreement about him replacing Dick Hayes as executive director. All that’s left is signing the papers on Wednesday. Garrido said she believes Hayes considered Tuesday his last day running the show.

At Tuesday’s board meeting, Hayes, who was the director for more than 28 years, wondered where all the time went. Then it took all nine board members and all the agency’s department heads taking turns to get through a four-page resolution honoring him and Kitsap Transit’s accomplishments. “The resolution speaks to that,” he said of the time.

Employees got an old propeller from the Carlisle II, spiffed it all up and mounted it on a wheeled platform for Hayes, a huge booster of passenger-only ferries. A plate on it reads, “Your leadership as the founding executive director and your dedication and commitment to land and water transportaton will benefit the citizens of Kitsap County for many years to come.”

Hayes also got two standing ovations and a the traditional bus farebox.

“I’m not sure I’ll miss the stress and strain, but I’ll miss the people,” he said. “It’s just been wonderful. I thank everybody for sticking with me and the staff for putting up with me.”

The state is looking into fixing the Highway 3-Highway 304 interchange, the worst bottleneck in the county.

That’s where Highway 3 comes south from Silverdale and merges from two lanes to one as it passes the car dealerships and sewer plant. Highway 304 whittles from three lanes to one if you count the carpool lane. Then they meet, with Highway 304 going over Highway 3 and becoming the right lane of Highway 3. It’s a funky connection, but not really the problem. The problems are the merges themselves. During the evening commute, cars get all backed up on both highways.

I hadn’t heard any plans for a fix, then it shows up this morning in the state Senate’s proposed supplemental transportation budget. Eleven projects would split $27 million for very preliminary design, engineering or to buy right of way. Highway 3-304 would get $500,000. This would be the first step, and who knows when if ever it would get done, but at least they’re thinking about it.

I vaguely remember writing something years ago about a study on blasting more lanes out of the basalt cliff. I think they determined it’d be too expensive, or dangerous. In fact, I think there was argument that a bridge across Sinclair Inlet would be just as cheap.

Ron Landon of Olympic Region DOT said they want to eliminate the “drop lane” coming down Highway 3 from the car dealers.

“The $500,000 would be to start some preliminary engineering to see how best to reconfigure that intersection to take away that drop lane and keep a good level of service on the leg coming in from 304,” he said.

Ferry folks will be riding the Bainbridge and Bremerton boats this week to tell people about plans to renovate Colman Dock in Seattle.
It’s not the fancy expansion and redevelopment they were talking about earlier, with a garden on the roof and all. It’ll just be fixing up what’s there, a big job in itself. The cost is estimated at $210 million.
The big plan was shelved because of low ridership projections and the focus on preserving existing facilities, according to a Department of Transportation information sheet. But the same paper says by 2030, the Seattle-Bainbridge Island route’s ridership is expected to increase by 39 percent, and by 25 percent for Seattle-Bremerton. Last year, 8.5 million riders used the Seattle terminal.
Part of the environmental process’ first step is outreach, which is bringing officials aboard the ferries. They’ll ride the 4:40 p.m., 5:30 p.m. and 6:20 p.m. sailings from Seattle to Bainbridge on Wednesday and the 4:20 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. departures from Seattle to Bremerton on Thursday. The following Thursday, Feb. 16, there’ll be a public meeting from 3:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Puget Sound Regional Council board room, 1011 Western Ave., Suite 500, a short walk from the dock. Public comments will be accepted between Wednesday and March 15.
Colman Dock is aging, deteriorating and not the best place to be during an earthquake. The plan is to replace the timber trestle part of the dock, replace the main terminal building, reconfigure the dock layout, replace the vehicle transfer span and overhead loading structures on the northern slip, and replace vessel landing aids.
Advantages would be fewer conflicts between cars and pedestrians, better pedestrian connections to local transit service, and removal of tons of creosote-treated timber piles form Elliott Bay.
The tentative timetable is environmental process and preliminary design into 2013, design from 2013 to 2015 and construction from 2015 to 2020.

Dave Ryan has finished his masterpiece. It’s hanging in Der Blokken Brewery in Manette.

A bill that passed the State House today would let cities and towns cut speed limits to 20 mph on non-arterial streets. It passed unanimously and now the so-called “Neighborhood Safe Speeds Bill” moves on to the Senate.

Bill proponents say it’s too much hassle now to reduce speed limits, so cities don’t do it. It entails an enginieering and traffic study, which requires staff time and money. The bill would let cities skip that step. It doesn’t mandate that any speed limits be lowered, but gives cities local control to do so if they choose.

Proponents say the bill would make it safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, especially children and old people. I can’t think of any places that around here that would benefit from dropping to 20 mph. Can cars even built to go that slow? Do speedometers work at that speed?

House Republican leaders are expected Tuesday to introduce their version of a transportation bill. It won’t go anywhere and they know it because they’ve loaded it up with a bunch of non-transportation stuff they know the Dems won’t go for.

The bill would mandate new offshore drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; divert oil revenues to pay for transportation projects and require passage of the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.  By insisting on these unrelated items, the House GOP is preventing passage of badly needed transportation legislation.

That violates my idea of fairness, no matter which party is doing it. These people are supposed to be grownups and yet they play these silly games with our country.

The ferry media study I wrote about last week wasn’t the one handed in to the Legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee. I was one draft behind, and there are some differences.

What the study doesn’t do, unlike I wrote earlier, is recommend separating car fares from driver fares, eliminating fees that generate little income, and consolidate fares among routes, Kathy Scanlan of consultant Cedar River Group informed me.

It suggests charging the same fare for Southworth-Fauntleroy, Southworth-Vashon and Vashon-Fauntleroy, but not for the Point Defiance-Tahlequah boat, as proposed earlier.

The next step would be for the Legislature to allocate $1.2 million this session to start putting it into play. Of that, $900,000 would go toward automatic vehicle measuring devices and $300,000 to add the stored-ride feature of ORCA for multi-ride cards.

Transportation funds over the next decade will be tied to jobs, jobs, jobs, County Commissioner Charlotte Garrido says, relaying a message from Gov. Gregoire.
Garrido was one of 31 people Gregoire selected to her Connecting Washington Task Force to develop a 10-year funding strategy for the state’s transportation system and present it to the 2012 Legislature.
“The whole time through, we talked about economic development — maintaining jobs and strengthening the economy,” Garrido said of the group’s five meetings.
The other consistent theme was preserving what we have, Garrido said last week.
The task force had to choose whether it thought the state needed $10 billion, $20 billion or $30 billion to get through the decade. It went with $20 million, and developed a menu of options to raise it.
Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond handed out a state map to the group with job clusters shown as yellow dots. The transportation money will be going to connect the dots    and improve freight corridors. There weren’t many dots on this side of Puget Sound.
At a local forum Garrido sponsored Thursday, the group agreed Kitsap must work with neighbors Mason, Jefferson and Clallam counties. What are the region’s industries? Tourism? Boat manufacturing? Ecology? Where do we put our yellow dots.
Garrido said we weren’t supposed to be thinking about individual projects or focusing on our own area. It was hard not to. You wonder what we’re going to get out of the deal. Because our traffic’s not as bad as the east side, will we get our fair share? Of the projects mentioned in the $20 million package, none were in Kitsap, though there was $175 million for a 144-car ferry that would probably benefit us. The ferry is considered preservation because it would replace a really old one.
We have a perfect example of what we don’t want our area to be. Unlike the I-5 corridor, we have to stay ahead of growth.
Gas tax revenues are dwindling. Most of it goes to specific projects. Any that’s left I would use to maintain our existing transportation system. I doubt that it’d be enough. Then if people want to add capacity or go faster, they can pay a toll. That’s the ultimate user fee, even more than the gas tax because it’s tied to a particular project. I hated the toll when they put it on the Narrows Bridge. It costs my family nearly $2,000 a year, and it’s only going to go up. But it beats sitting in traffic a half hour or more each way, not knowing when you’re going to get somewhere, wasting time, polluting.
The state is studying just about every major road east of Puget Sound for tolls — the I-5 express lanes, 405, 509, 167 extension. It’s going to happen. One transponder will work for them all.
Over here, when they widen Hood Canal Bridge to four lanes, there’ll be a toll. The Belfair Bypass is the deemed one of the most important if not the most important project in our area. It’d be new capacity, so should be tolled. There’s not enough traffic to pay for it, though, so I don’t know how you’d handle those situations.
Garrido said the governor was interested in the idea of paying for transportation maintenance and operation with a monthly fee, like a water bill.
“It’s a new world out there,” Garrido said, “and we’re helping the public understand that right now. The public’s going to have to recognize we have to make choices. Things are changing, now we have to change.”

A Washington State Transportation Commission survey released Tuesday shows residents would raise taxes and fees to maintain a good transportation system. Considering the mood of the recession-weary, anti-government populace these days, that’s hard to believe.

Fifty-nine percent said they’d generally support raising some transportation and fees, but only three of nine potential funding sources got a majority. Sixty-one percent would support a vehicle emissions fee, 60 percent a special license fee for electric cars and 52 percent tolls.

The money should first got to maintaining and repairing the existing transportation system, they said, followed by increasing capacity and expanding travel options.

Fifty-nine percent support tolling as a way to pay for major projects, 62 percent support express HOV lanes that single-occupant vehicles can use for a price, 51 percent think toll money should be available for improvements in a traffic corridor instead of just for the project, 63 percent support more state funding for public transit and passenger rail, and 57 percent support using state funds to operate and maintain the state ferry system.

The Transportation Commission invited 100,000 Washington residents to participate in the online survey, with a goal of 5,000 actually taking it. There were 5,518 total responses.

There’s now a survey online for the broader public. It can be taken until the end of the year at www.voiceofwashingtonsurvey.org.

The governor’s Connecting Washington Task Force can use the survey insight into what tax and fees the public will tolerate in making recommendations for a 10-year transportation investment plan.