||| FROM KOMO NEWS |||
Starting Tuesday, Washington ferry prices will rise again for the second time in two years to help ensure the state meets revenue requirements laid out in the 2023-2025 transportation budget.
Both passenger and vehicle fares will increase by 4.25% on Oct. 1 of this year. Click here to see how the increase will impact fares by route.
Washington State Ferries said it’s also the first day with no peak season surcharge for vehicles, which will resume May 1, 2025.
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Using WSF historic data, the is the 19th increase in ferry fares since 2000. Since every fare increase is a percentage of the previous fare increase, my calculation shows the percentage increase since January 2000 is just over 153%. That doesn’t include the capital charges added for new ferries, and not clear if the fuel surcharges are or not included as fare increases.
The inflation index since 2000 is 82.8%, so ferry fares are going up about double the rate of inflation.
But the real news is ferry service is getting increasingly worse as the fares continue to climb.. On time performance on the San Juan routes was just over 41% last month, and that’s after the Anacortes to Sydney ferry is in a long term hold until at least 2030 and cancelled sailings are now not sailings, so they are ignored for on time performance statistics.
In simplest of terms, ferry fares up, service level and reliability down. That of course is stating the obvious.
Perhaps it is finally time for SJC to seriously address taking care of our own transportation needs? If we don’t have any redundancy in access to the islands, we could be completely stranded by one incident/accident. Remember the Elwha crashing into the Orcas dock? What if the ANACORTES dock was put out of commission for weeks or months? Imagine the Yakima completely losing power while coming into the terminal in a Northeaster…
Resiliency often comes at the expense of efficiency and WSF, being a 75 year old bureaucracy, headed by career bureaucrats, values efficiency far higher, despite being unable to provide either to the Anacortes – San Juan Island run. Eventually centralized management and the lack of adequate funding will force us to develop a passenger/light cargo transportation system for ourselves. So, do we start working on it now while we still have “half-fast” service from WSF? Or will we wait until we’re completely stranded and figure it out on the fly with “emergency” measures?
It’s simply not financially realistic to consider establishing a San Juan County ferry district when there are only 18,500 citizens (that includes children and the U.S. census bureau says we have lost a fraction of population last year) and a relatively minuscule and seasonal economic base.
Tax increases and fares would have to be relatively astronomical with such a small population and economic base.
In the simplest of terms, WSF system needs to perform reliably, meet their goal of 95% on time performance, and keep the number of ferries to operate the system available.
Not likely that’s going to happen given multiple union contracts with always increasing wage and benefit demands, the historical union seniority first vessel crew replacement system, and (reportedly) keeping crews assigned to vessels that are in longer term maintenance or overhaul.