The two boat schedule serving the Triangle route just “doesn’t work,” WSF staff acknowledged in a recent public meeting — but changing it will be easier said than done.

So what does the future hold for Vashon, after Washington State Ferries’ recent announcement that full ferry service is unlikely to return before 2028?

The Beachcomber listened in on three recent meetings — two held by WSF to answer questions and the other with Vashon’s Ferry Advisory Committee — to get some answers.

For the last two years, WSF has released periodic service restoration plans, estimating when full ferry service would return to routes such as the Triangle. Those estimates were regularly pushed back as WSF failed to meet the loose deadlines it set for itself.

“We were not able to meet those goals,” WSF Director of Planning, Customer and Government Relations John Vezina said. Hence the new service contingency plan, which Vezina said was written with the goal of being transparent, consistent and predictable in laying out ferry service.

Another word to describe the plan is sobering. Instead of earlier estimates, which measured the time to three-boat service in months, WSF’s new blueprint is designed to cover the next four to five years.

“In March of 2022 and again in February 2023, we put out service restoration plans based on our best estimates of when we would have crewing and vessels available … but obviously those are dynamic issues,” Vezina said. “We realized … that what we’d inadvertently done is given false hope to folks, and false expectations. That’s why we’ve shifted to a service contingency plan.”

(A longer version of this article appears online.)

The Triangle route

Given that the Puget Sound will wait years for the new ferries to arrive, commenters asked WSF to consider updating the Triangle’s two boat schedule in the meantime.

“This is a really reasonable frustration,” Vezina said. “… What was supposed to be emergency service … has now stretched into multiple years. It struggles to keep its on-time performance.”

However, until both crewing and the number of ferries become consistent, the Triangle route will operate with two vessels, WSF administration said. Rewriting the schedules will involve outreach to other communities and hiring staff with the skill and time to update the schedule, WSF staff said.

“It’s a two-boat schedule that doesn’t work,” Vezina said. “And unfortunately, the amount of work that has to go into re-writing a schedule, we don’t have the staff to update it. We know how difficult that makes things for you.”

It’s “entirely reasonable” to ask WSF to try to rewrite the schedule given the hard years of ferry service ahead, Vashon’s Ferry Advisory Committee (FAC) chair Justin Hirsch told WSF staff during the latest FAC meeting: “We need to see a rewrite … sooner rather than later.”

“We know that schedule isn’t great,” WSF spokesperson Hadley Rodero responded. “… It’s a lengthy process, as you know. … I think that’s something we definitely need to consider … but it just comes down to resources.”

The Triangle route is the first priority for fully restored service in the plan, as well as a priority for additional temporary or seasonal service when crewing and vessel numbers allow. That’s because “Vashon is an island,” Vezina said: “Its residents are wholly reliant on our service to get back-and-forth.”

Vezina said he’s spoken with King County and Vashon’s state legislators about improving passenger-only ferry service to Vashon, which WSF is helping fund on its Bremerton route.

One commenter asked: What about adding a new route from Vashon to downtown Seattle?

Any new routes must be added by the legislature, Vezina responded. And a 2013 study from WSF showed that 50% of vehicles landing on the Fauntleroy terminal turn right, heading south to communities such as White Center and Burien rather than toward Seattle, Vezina said, indicating that the Fauntleroy dock is a fairly ideal landing point.

Regardless, such a new route would take much longer, affect sailings for other communities and contribute to more traffic in the already car-congested downtown Seattle, Vezina warned.

Another commenter asked: What about building a bridge to connect the north end of Vashon Island to the Kitsap Peninsula and West Seattle?

The proposal has floated in the periphery of ferry conversations for decades, despite receiving constant condemnation from most islanders. Residents famously said ‘no’ to the idea in 1992 during a public meeting that brought out nearly a fifth of the island’s entire population.

Shipping lanes, tribal fishing rights and resident concerns make the idea of building a bridge now “extremely difficult,” WSF Chief of Staff Nicole McIntosh replied.

Meanwhile, WSF is now considering a range of dock options for its upcoming rebuild of the Fauntleroy terminal — including some designs that could eliminate the pile-up of traffic bound for Vashon and Southworth that tends to accumulate on Fauntleroy Way SW.

The smallest design options hold as many cars as the current dock or fewer, while the largest — alternative C — could carry enough vehicles to remove the need for a vehicle queue on Fauntleroy Way. Vashon participants at an October WSF meeting, unsurprisingly, supported the largest design.

All three of Vashon’s FAC members agreed.

“Please pick alternative C,” Hirsch told WSF staff, in a dry, humorous tone, during the latest FAC meeting — pointing out that it preserves beloved community features in the Fauntleroy neighborhood while getting more cars off the road and onto the dock.

“It’s a win for us, (and) it’s a win for them,” FAC member Wendy Aman said.

“No need for further review,” FAC member Rachel Rome said with a laugh. “There you have it. It’s option C.”

WSF plans to select its “preferred alternative” dock design by the end of 2025.

Tiding over

High demand for service and a limited stock of boats and crew are the primary challenges to restoring service, WSF said.

Its fleet has dwindled from 24 vessels in 2015 to only 21 now, and the boats in operation are aging. Those boats run 50 weeks per year, 20-plus hours per day, which means they are also frequently pulled out for maintenance and repair. WSF is on track to get its first new vessel in early 2028.

“We basically have no spare vessels,” Vezina said. “There’s nothing to spare. … There’s no leeway there.”

It will take 26 vessels in total, or another 5, to provide reliable service on every route, WSF said.

A change in state law last year will allow WSF to expand its vessel-building program out of state. Nine bidders have expressed interest so far in working with WSF on constructing those new ferries, WSF staff said, and an invitation for bid should be scheduled by spring this year.

All of the new vessels will be built according to WSF’s in-house design, McIntosh said, and they could work with multiple bidders to have two or three ships built at the same time.

“Really, the funding becomes the constraint at that point,” McIntosh said.

Staffing remains the other half of the squeeze on WSF’s capabilities. The agency lost roughly 120 employees due to the COVID-19 vaccination mandate, WSF staff said. That mandate has been lifted, WSF has hired “a few” back, and the agency has “more than hired” that number back since then, McIntosh said.

However, half of WSF’s most credentialed deck and engine room employees are retirement-eligible in the next five years, in what Vezina called a “coming generational transition.”

Legislative appropriations from last year have injected millions in new funding to the agency to hire and retain employees, and Vezina said WSF believes those programs will boost the agency’s staffing to the level it needs to reach to increase service within two years, reducing the number of cancellations due to crewing shortages.

Those crewing shortages are felt worldwide, Vezina said, referencing an estimate in the Vancouver Sun that the ferry industry currently faces a 21,000-person shortage of mariners.

The legislature this year will pass an amended budget for the current fiscal biennium. Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposed supplemental budget would add $49 million for ferry operations (a 7% increase) and $133 million to the Ferry Capital budget (a 25% increase) — large increases which WSF says will help them grow their crews, electrify and preserve ferries and perform studies for future service.

Meanwhile, demand is climbing back up to pre-COVID levels.

Data recently released by WSF shows ridership on the ferries rose 7.4% last year, though it still only reached 78% of pre-COVID-19 levels. WSF anticipates ridership to keep growing as travel demands increase.

For the second year in a row, that rise in ridership was fueled by a large rise in walk-on passengers, signaling rebounding tourism and in-person work rates, according to WSF. Vehicle ridership also increased, though modestly.

On the Triangle route, total ridership increased 6%, vehicles increased 4% and walk-ons increased by 13%. On the Pt. Defiance / Tahlequah route, year-to-year total riders increased 8%, vehicles rose 4% and walk-ons increased by 19%.