The Moat and the Ferry Run | Imagining public transit for Orcas Island

||| FROM COLIN WILLIAMS |||

Framing Transportation

We face real environmental challenges, and transportation is a contributing factor towards the issues we face here on our islands.

Transportation can also be a barrier to equity. I believe one of the best ways to address both our environmental issues and equity issues related to transportation is to provide a base level of transportation accessible to everyone.

In a spirit of volunteerism and wanting to contribute to the public benefit in my community — and after first reaching out to incumbent transportation groups with no response. I worked towards creating the “Friends of Rural Public Transportation.”

Engineering Practices

How do you design a system, or a product? How do you evaluate it? In a previous article [1], we introduced what we call “AAA Service” requirements that we claim could be employed to evaluate any transportation service. These are simply: Affordability, Accessibility, and Availability. As a quick first step, think about a transportation service: What are the hours of operation? What places does it serve? Can everyone use it, or does it cater to a particular segment of the population? What are the implementation and operating costs?

But aside from evaluating the benefits of the service itself, what about the “side effects” of that service? Does that service have the potential to reduce the number of cars on our roads? Will that service increase visitor traffic? What is the “Carbon Cycle” impact of that service? Could that service have any impact on our ferry system operations?

Engineering involves a planning process. We need information to create the best design: understanding our users and their needs, current road usage patterns, and whether we want to set limitations to prevent negative impacts. Our initial proposal [2] translated the AAA requirements into a concrete three-route plan covering the island’s key destinations.

Early Visions

When I started thinking about route planning years ago, I thought about how we could build a robust transportation system that people would think twice about: “Could I leave the car at home and catch the island transit?” Fiddling around with Google Maps, drawing on experience from ridership in regional transportation systems, and being around the island roads, I suggested that a three-route operation — East, West, and Central routes with a 45-minute to hourly service interval — might be a good shot at something we could pull off, something that may attract ridership and benefit us in many ways [2].

I mention “fiddling around with Google Maps” deliberately — this kind of grassroots exploration is something anyone in our community can do. We’d love for more islanders to think through these questions and bring their own ideas forward.

But if we think about transit system design, driver salaries are one of the biggest expenditures. The most significant expenses in public transit are staff salaries and infrastructure/vehicle purchase costs [1]. If we reduced the number of salaried employees, what could we get away with by reducing the number of routes in terms of reduced infrastructure and operating costs?

Cold Start Design Thought Experiments

Assume that we don’t have the luxury of information from the incumbent transportation planners. Assume that the county employees are too busy to answer informal (or formal) information requests [3]. Let’s work through planning a hypothetical system and see where we arrive.

A “cold start” design means building a plan from scratch without baseline ridership data or institutional support — which is the situation we find ourselves in.

Hypothetical Route Plans

Route 1: The East–West “Transportation Moat”

This plan would essentially be a single fixed-route system with one operating vehicle at a time, running East–West: Doe Bay to Eastsound to Deer Harbor. It would allow stopping at Turtleback Mountain Preserve and Moran State Park. It includes travel through the Deer Harbor, West Sound, and Doe Bay hamlets. This could be implemented at approximately an hourly service interval.

We call it the “Transportation Moat” because it doesn’t service travel between Orcas Landing and Eastsound. If we didn’t want to allow access to transportation for visitors arriving at the ferry landing, we could employ this route. It’s my perception that it does provide value in connecting many of our hamlets and key destinations — with the big caveat that some residents may see the exclusion of the ferry landing as an advantage in managing visitor volume.

As a Deer Harbor resident, I see high value in this route’s ability to connect our hamlets — Deer Harbor, Olga, West Sound — together with our village of Eastsound. A resident of any of these communities would benefit from direct transit connections to the others. Of course, we must admit that Orcas Landing, White Beach, Orcas Road, Buckhorn, and other areas are all not included in this route.

Route 2: The North–South “Ferry Run”

This route is perhaps the most commonly envisioned route. It serves between Orcas Landing and Eastsound. In its simplest form, it might connect just these two destinations. High-density areas near Eastsound would be well served by this route, along with a trip down North Beach Road, perhaps a detour to Buckhorn Road, and maybe a return route through Enchanted Forest Road.

The value this route provides is supporting one of our highest-traffic areas and serving our busiest roadway — the corridor between the ferry landing and our village. Subsidizing walk-on passenger fares combined with transit could prove more cost-effective than subsidizing vehicle fares across the WSF [3]. Route 2 would be the natural backbone for that approach.

However, while this route addresses a real traffic need, it does little on its own to provide adequate transportation across our island or to fully connect our community.

Not Fully Informed Opinion

The heading of this section is deliberate. We acknowledge the significant work we’ve put into this analysis, but we want to be transparent: we are operating without information that should be available to us. Our open letter to Island Rides and local transportation officials — published in full in A Community Conversation on Island Transportation — went unanswered. The incumbent transportation planning group has not been working with us, and our information requests to county agencies have gone largely unfulfilled. This limits any plan we produce, and we believe the community should know that.

With that said, if there were a single route implemented on Orcas, I’d argue that Route 1 would be the most beneficial for islanders in building a sense of community. It would connect most of the major hamlets to our village and vice versa.

In the case that Route 2 was the only route implemented on Orcas, its main benefit is connecting the ferry landing to our village and addressing traffic on our busiest corridor. There is real value in that, but on its own it isn’t realistic in providing connectivity throughout our community.

If we were to create a sustainable transportation system that could have a very positive impact on our community, it’s our opinion that the most valuable system implementation requires the development of both routes. Evaluated against our AAA requirements [1], Routes 1 and 2 together provide the strongest combination of Accessibility across the island and Availability at reasonable operating cost.

What’s Missing (Aside from Information)

Quite a bit. This isn’t a fully informed plan. We have the aforementioned issue regarding information access. Vehicle selection, technology type, flag stops, required infrastructure costs, seasonal changes, flex route possibilities, and more remain unaddressed. We provide some framework for evaluation but don’t apply it fully in this discussion. We don’t discuss “side effects.”

For context on our broader vision — including vehicle selection considerations, the case for starting with conventional vehicles, and the school district resource-sharing model — see [1] and [2]. Our comments on the county’s comprehensive plan [4] also address how transit fits into the county’s broader transportation planning.

However, despite our limited access to information, we believe that this plan represents a strong foundation for further planning.

We look forward to continuing this discussion — and we want to hear from you. Visit forpt.org to see our upcoming community meetings, join our mailing list, or share your thoughts on these routes. Your input will make this plan better.

References

[1] Transit System Design: A “Good Enough” Vision for Orcas Island — Our vision for a practical transit implementation, the AAA evaluation framework, and cost analysis identifying staff salaries and capital expenditure as primary cost drivers. Updated version on our site | Original in The Orcasonian

[2] Should Orcas Island Have Public Transit? — Our initial opinion piece proposing a three-route summer transit pilot and the school district resource-sharing model. Updated version on our site | Original in The Orcasonian

[3] A Community Conversation on Island Transportation — Our correspondence with local transportation officials, including discussion of walk-on fare subsidies and information requests that went largely unfulfilled. Updated version on our site | Original in The Orcasonian

[4] Comments on SJC’s Comprehensive Plan Transportation Element — Our advocacy for including public transit in county transportation planning. Published in The Orcasonian

Data Sources

WSF Ridership Data Reports — Ferry ridership data we’ve been analyzing as part of our planning process.

About the Author

I’m Colin Williams, a “2nd generation” resident of San Juan County. Dave Roseberry from the Orcas Grange told me islanders used to say my dad Bill Williams came to Orcas pushing a wheelbarrow off the ferry. Bill first came to Orcas with longtime resident Margot Shaw, the mother of my half sister Christine, who was born here.

My mother Sara Williams grew up in Deer Park, Washington. She is a writer — a journalist and a novelist. She met my father at Rosario Resort in the 1970s. If you want to blame someone for my writing, you might blame her for encouraging me to write.

I’ve spent perhaps around 15–20 years of my adulthood on island. I attended part of my youth at Orcas Island Middle and High School, and many adolescent summers on Orcas. Aside from Orcas, I’ve probably spent around 15 years in the Seattle Metro as an adult. I share this background because my perspective on island transportation comes from decades of living in and traveling around this community.