The State Transportation Commission’s August public meetings on fare changes weren’t well advertised and attendance was poor.
Three people attended the meeting in Bainbridge, three at Bremerton, and no Kingston meeting was held.
The 3½ percent fare increase and the new 25 cents-per-ticket ferry surcharge had been the subject of a lot of legislative debate this winter. Two other fare proposals, which weren’t debated, are problematic and we oppose them: changing fares for different size cars and a fuel surcharge.
Changed car fares
State Ferries has undertaken to add a new category of vehicles to the tariff list, creating a Small Car Fare which applies to those vehicles under 14 feet and which will ultimately be 70 percent of the Standard Car and Driver Fare. Their idea is to create more deck space by getting everyone to use smaller cars and to create a way to handle the three-wheeled motorcycles, charging them as small cars because they use that much deck space. This would add 5 cents to every Standard Car and Driver Fare to subsidize the small cars and it will be charged even when the boat isn’t full and deck space isn’t a problem. How this fare would be handled at the toll booths also remains a mystery. Nonetheless, as of this writing, the Commission will likely put it into practice as of October.
Fuel surcharge
Despite the fact that new ferry fares must be voted upon by the Legislature, the commission plans to go ahead with a fuel surcharge even though no vote has been taken. Initiative 1053, passed in fall 2010, required that “fees” can only be “imposed or increased” … “if approved with majority legislative approval in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.”
In the Attorney General’s December opinion, he concluded that this requirement applied to our ferry fares. After the legislative session ended, however, the House Transportation Committee sent a letter to the Commission stating that although there hadn’t been a vote on a surcharge, the Commission could still impose one. Sen. Rolfes is following up on this issue for us.
Emails wanted
Gov. Chris Gregoire called forth a task force to fix the WSDOT funding shortfall. Please go to the governor’s website and email the Connecting Washington Task Force, urging them to include sustainable ferry funding in their recommendations.
Whistling
When the ferry approaches the dock, it sounds a long whistle followed by two short ones. This is Morse code for the letter D and is called the “docking signal.” It goes back more than a century and serves to alert dock crews and passengers that the boat’s coming in.
In the days of the Puget Sound Navigation Company’s Black Ball Line, some ferries had steam engines and steam whistles. As you may recall from Kingston’s steamboat rendezvous here a few years back, a steam whistle can have its own personality by using flutters and accents when pulling the whistle cord. This is like those “wolf whistles” on cars back in the ’60s. With steam whistle flourishes, you could tell who the captain of the ferry was by his “signature” when sounding the boat’s whistle.
In 1951, the state bought the Puget Sound Navigation Company and spoiled the fun. A decree was sent out from Seattle that the “long and two shorts” signal would be changes to a simple “long and short” signal. This received the well-deserved disdain of ferry crews and riders alike. By 1958, we were back to the “long and two short” blasts that we hear today, albeit without the flourishes.
