— from Laurel Rust, Orcas Landing —
The new toll booth, at the left in this picture, will soon be functional, and require traffic form one line immediately after making the turn from Orcas Road
As many of you have noticed, there is a new ticket booth in the upper lot at the Orcas Ferry Terminal, awaiting completion. If things move according to plan, sometime on Tuesday, October 13, the new booth may be in operation,the old booth vacated (and at some point taken away. )
This means that customers turning off the county road to head for the ferry will need to form one single line of traffic approaching the new booth, which is on the opposite side of the access lanes from the diagonal parking, set in against the hillside, and involves a fairly sharp left turn from the county road.
Hopefully customers will understand that though the “access lanes” are three lanes wide, traffic has to funnel through one lane to the new booth. Ferry customers will no longer be able to access the ferry lot by driving up the hill by the Orcas Hotel.
Any way to give out numbers to those entering the 3 lane funnel. I think the three lane funnel to the booth is a good idea, but this is a country which carries loaded guns, and I can just imagine an irate #29 in line 2 shooting a #35 in line 3 for having been put in the single lane ahead of “him” or “her”. Just joking, but …..
Question: Are people who live past the ferry landing expected to drive past the entrance to the ferry ticket line, find the end of the line, and then make a U-turn on Orcas road to get in the back of the line? It seems to me that since Orcas Road is a public road and the ferry line is extending onto that road from the access lane, that the people coming from both directions should have chances to enter the ferry lane from Orcas Road.
The way traffic enters from the county road is no different than it has always been, coming from both directions on the county road and yielding right of way. The only change is that when you funnel down to a single lane, you funnel in to the lane closest to the hillside, and the new booth is closer to the county road than the old one was.
I assume the adjacent enlarged space will provide additional long term diagonal parking spaces, and add a left turn lane into the booth lane, and disallow shoulder parking on Orcas Road?
Knowing how hard the staff works at the Orcas ferry landing, I think that it is really terrific that the new toll booth has a latte machine included AND a sofa, a flat screen TV and a pool table.