Passenger-only Tacoma-Seattle ferry service is highly desired. What are the prospects?
A new study on passenger-only ferry service between Tacoma and Seattle underscores both the popularity of the idea and the many barriers that remain to making it a reality.
The study, released by the Puget Sound Regional Council, put the Tacoma-to-Seattle route at the top of the score card for proposed future routes.
Such a route would shave 15 minutes off a one-way trip between the two cities as compared with bus travel on I-5, taking just under an hour one-way.
The study noted interest remains high in the Puget Sound region for such a route, particularly in Thurston County, where 48 percent of survey respondents listed it as a Top 3 route choice.
One barrier to making it happen is competing interests for funding dollars against other projects, such as light rail expansion.
Another, perhaps more pressing one, is an already overburdened Seattle pier at which to arrive, with no clear solution yet for alternative landings.
“And that’s a real limiting factor for this,” Pierce County Councilman Ryan Mello told The News Tribune in a recent interview.
Add to that the new world of working at home and companies rethinking the need for Seattle office space, and a commuter ferry seems more like just another dream more than an imminent reality.
Financing
For now, there are two providers of year-round passenger-only ferry service in the area, neither serving Tacoma: King County Metro and Kitsap Transit.
The service proposed is a commute-focused, year-round, five-days-a-week passenger-only ferry with three hourly morning peak departures and three hourly evening peak departures.
The study noted that a Tacoma-to-Seattle route “could be expanded to provide weekend or evening service if desired to meet the increase in (passenger-only ferry) demand that typically occurs in the summer.”
The report added, “The Tacoma–Seattle route has the highest fuel costs, with fuel representing almost 20 percent of annual costs.
“Tacoma–Seattle route is projected to spend about $800,000 a year on fuel at today’s prices. At 2019 fuel prices, that would be almost $1.3 million.”
Among those proposed in the PSRC study, the Tacoma-Seattle route would be the most expensive to fund, at a projected cost of $14.8 million capital cost per vessel, running an estimated two vessels with one backup.
“This route has long travel time but needs to operate with frequent service to meet commuter needs,” it noted. “As a result, the vessel fleet will require two service vessels, as well as a spare vessel, which significantly increases upfront capital investment.”
Mello noted that finding funding is not an insurmountable issue.
“I know that the money is actually not the huge limiting factor here. Especially with the new federal administration, and stimulus funds and where the interest is both at the state and federal level on economic stimulus,” he told The News Tribune.
Mello has long been a vocal proponent for the city gaining ferry service. He also now serves on the Pierce Transit Board of Commissioners.
“Funding for building boats and electrification of boats, these kinds of things are not difficult to convince those decision makers to throw in,” he said. “When they’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus, a $10 million boat is ... budget dust when they’re at the scale that the federal government and the state government is talking about.
“This will have to be subsidized like anything else, to about the tune of a third (of the cost), and finding that revenue is part of the hard part.”
The report noted, in feedback it received from its jurisdictional outreach, “There is competing interest for transit dollars with light rail expansion.”
Tacoma and Seattle issues
The launch site mentioned in the study on the Tacoma side was the 11th Street Dock, where it noted over-water work needed for the route (the addition of fendering, a boarding ramp and a transfer span) would require an evaluation of habitat impacts during the environmental permitting process.
Tacoma has another ferry launch at Point Defiance, serving Tahlequah (Vashon) for automobile-passenger ferry service.
“There is opportunity to provide connections to and from the City of Ruston, if the landing was located at a Ruston landing location,” according to the report. “While parking is available in Ruston, there is no existing in-water infrastructure to support passenger-only ferry service.”
The challenge beyond funding, from Mello’s perspective, is on the Seattle side, with its already busy ferry terminal.
“The hard part is the landing site in downtown Seattle,” he said. “There’s so much congestion on the Seattle waterfront. ... There’s a real bottleneck when you get to the Seattle side of this.”
According to the study: “This route would land in downtown Seattle, where (passenger-only ferry) docking space is currently limited.”
For now, the recently renovated Pier 50 serves as a passenger-only ferry landing for the King County water taxi and the Kitsap fast ferries.
“Additional docking capacity will need to be identified to accommodate this or other potential (passenger-only ferry) service,” the study noted.
It added that the Seattle Terminal Siting Study, sponsored by Kitsap Transit, is now underway to explore options.
Ridership and the pandemic
It’s not clear what ferry traffic will look like in the coming years if pandemic-based work-from-home habits become more of the standard for past ferry riders.
“That question is top of my mind,” Mello said. “I think decision makers like myself need to see how it goes.”
Kitsap fast ferry traffic was up 61 percent in 2019 over 2018, driven primarily by the introduction of new passenger-only ferry service on the Kingston-Seattle route in November 2018.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the November transportation revenue forecast for overall state ferry traffic, passenger “ridership is not expected to recover from the recent downturn to the fiscal year 2021 level until 2027 ... . Vehicle ferry ridership is anticipated to be back to the (fiscal year) 2021 level from the February forecast in 2025 ...”
Washington State Ferries said in a report in January its annual automobile-passenger ferry ridership “plunged” by nearly 10 million customers in 2020 – a drop of 41 percent from the previous year – to roughly 14 million.
“In recent months, state ferry ridership has returned to about 60 percent of pre-pandemic levels,” WSF noted. “Total vehicles are near 70 percent of 2019 numbers, while walk-ons are around 20 percent of last year.
”Ridership is expected to rebound further as more sailings are restored and when COVID-19 is under control.”
While some routes, mainly those to Seattle, saw dramatic drops, the Point Defiance-Tahlequah (Vashon) saw the smallest year-to-year dip, with total riders down 22 percent and vehicles dropping 15 percent, according to the report.
“Stay-at-home orders, remote work and decreased tourism because of COVID-19 are the main reasons for the system’s lowest yearly count since 1975,” WSF noted.
Future unknown
Mello said there’s too much unknown to predict future ridership for a new Seattle-Tacoma route.
“I think we need to see after that, after the pandemic, when people are going back and doing things pretty robustly in person, I think we need to really observe what real human behavior is, what real companies are doing with their workforce and what real humans are doing with their lives,” he said.
One positive aspect that could take hold, Mello noted, is the ripple effect on the economy, notably with jobs and tourism in a post-COVID world.
“... boatbuilders are great-paying jobs,” he said. “There’s a lot of other public benefits. I think when you start putting it all together, it becomes competitive compared to a lot of the other stimulus ideas that federal and state government are thinking about.”
The study offered that the city of Des Moines had interest in the route as a possible added stop, though PSRC noted in the report: “... the addition of any stops would increase the route trip time, which is often less desirable for riders.”
The latest report stands as a conceptual/feasibility study submitted to the Legislature. What’s next, according to PSRC, depends on local governments and the state.
“Service providers such as transit agencies, local governments and private companies can use the information in the study as a springboard for continued work to develop potential service,” PSRC noted.
Other routes, while holding some appeal, fell away from the next phase of consideration.
Gig Harbor, for example, isn’t a likely contender for a Seattle route, given limitations of its own to docking such a large vessel and an already crowded harbor.
Other potential routes will get a “more detailed assessment,” along with Seattle-Tacoma, including Bellingham to Friday Harbor, South Whidbey Island to Everett; Kenmore, Kirkland and Renton to the University of Washington, and Renton to South Lake Union.
For now, it seems to be a matter of wait and see for Tacoma, with the report doing little to move Tacoma closer to a passenger-only ferry future in the near term, according to Mello.
“I’m usually a very optimistic person,” he told The News Tribune. “I don’t think it gets us that much closer.”
Staff writer Chase Hutchinson contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 13, 2021 at 5:05 AM.
