The folly of foot ferries

What's a reasonable cost for a 30-minute walk-on ferry ride?

If I said $3 or $5 or maybe $10, I'm guessing you'd shrug and say, "OK, fine."

But what if the ferry ride costs $24? Each way?

How about $139.92? Or $324.94?

Most normal people would say: "You're crazy. I could commission my own boat and captain with that kind of money."

King County doesn't appear to be run by normal people.

These figures of $24 on up to $325 per rider are actual per-trip cost estimates for operating the new $220 million foot-ferry fleet that King County wants to install on Lake Washington and Puget Sound. The staggering estimates are in a 220-page report finalized last fall by the Puget Sound Regional Council.

King County looked at this report. It raised a few eyebrows. But it hasn't stopped the county from forging full steam ahead on its quixotic quest of reviving the long-dead Mosquito Fleet.

Now, the county has released its own 211-page study of foot-ferry routes. It doesn't include cost estimates. But it hints at roughly the same conclusion as every study ever conducted on this idea.

Which is that it makes no sense.

"While the ridership estimates in this [study] are by and large higher than those of the previous studies, no route is projected to attract more than 300 riders a day during the summer season, when ridership is expected to be at its highest level," the June 30, 2009, study concludes.

You read that right. Three hundred riders per day is the high end. Most of the routes would carry half that. All of them drop below 100 riders per day in the fall, winter and spring.

That means no more people than can fit in a Duck Boat or two. Subsidized with tens or hundreds of taxpayer dollars each time they take a ride. That price doesn't include the $30 million to buy each ferry.

Doesn't matter. By Sept. 1, King County is set to pick two new routes for foot-ferry service in 2010. (None of this is to be confused with car ferries, which are run by the state.) The leading contenders are a 25-minute sail between Kirkland and the UW (which the 2008 study said would cost $24 per passenger to operate.) And a 30-minute trip in the Sound from Shilshole to downtown Seattle ($139 per passenger).

The idea of passenger-ferry service across Lake Washington has been studied, by my count, seven times in two decades. By Metro, the Port of Seattle, Sound Transit, the Puget Sound Regional Council and now King County.

Yet we keep at our foot-ferry folly with the doggedness of Ahab. Why?

"I think it's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' " said Fred Jarrett, a candidate for King County executive, who last week became the first public official I can remember to come out against the foot ferries. "It's that old-time romance of boats on water. There's a mystique there that is unstoppable."

Jarrett says if he's elected he'd move to take the $20 million in annual property taxes for foot ferries and give it to the unromantic bus system. (He says the Legislature freed the county to do that this year.) A typical boring bus route carries 3,000 to 5,000 riders daily at a cost of about $5 per rider.

But nobody quotes Coleridge poems about buses, do they?

Now another candidate, Ross Hunter, says he opposes the ferries, too. Some realism seems to be seeping into county politics, maybe because of the budget crisis. That's not stopping two of the leading candidates — Dow Constantine and Larry Phillips — from supporting the ferry-expansion idea (Constantine is the prime backer, and he chairs the ferry committee.)

The other day I took the Vashon foot ferry (which, in its defense, at least goes to an island, unlike any of the proposed new routes). As awful as the economics of foot ferrying is, it was immediately obvious why opposing them won't win you any votes.

The boat arced from a glittering downtown around Alki, past waving kayakers and bobbing seals, before coursing in blue and white spray into the island.

It was rush hour. Water, water was everywhere. Riders, though, were not — the ferry was two-thirds empty.

Wasn't there something in that Coleridge poem about an albatross around the neck?

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.