SEATTLE — The fares passengers pay to ride a state ferry cover well over half the cost to run the system.
But with diminished ridership, the gap between what it takes to run Washington State Ferries and what the agency brings in with fares is growing, leading to today’s 4.25 percent rate hike — or about 75 cents to drive onto the system’s busiest routes.
The increase, approved in August 2023 by the Washington State Transportation Commission, is to meet a target set by lawmakers, but stems from the fact that the system relies on its riders for revenue. When ridership goes down, so does revenue. To make up for that lost revenue, fares increase.
Fare revenues currently cover 57 percent of WSF’s operations. The remaining 43 percent comes from other state sources, as does all of the system’s capital costs, such as the construction and maintenance of its ferries and terminals.
When legislators created the 2023 session’s two-year transportation budget, which ends in mid-2025, they budgeted $725 million for ferry operations. They set a farebox revenue target of $419 million, meaning that’s how much the Legislature said must come from the fares passengers pay to ride a ferry.
Lawmakers calculated that a 4 percent fare increase was needed to meet their target. The state transportation commission, the state body tasked with setting fares, ended up raising them by 4.25 percent two years in a row to offset a two-year, temporary discount to the multiride passes that already offer reduced prices.
This year, a single-ride passenger ticket between downtown Seattle and Bainbridge Island, the state’s most popular route, will increase from $9.85 to $10.25. The price for a standard car and driver will go from $17.90 to $18.65 for the same route.
Aaron Halbert, the transportation commission’s financial analyst, said fares have increased “every year for the last 20-plus years,” but the need for the recent fare increases comes from the not so simple facts that there are fewer sailings and fewer passengers.
“It’s very much driven by two major issues: the workforce issues … and then the aging of the fleet as well,” Halbert said. “Those two paired together, with the impacts of COVID, means people aren’t taking the ferry every day to go to work anymore.”
The dent in ridership can be pinned to the pandemic. Before 2020, the ferries carried 24 million or more passengers a year. In 2020, the number plummeted to 14 million and has inched its way up since, with 18.6 million passengers in 2023.
In 2019, WSF had 163,050 scheduled sailings, and canceled 913 of them. In 2022, the most recent year with available data, there were 132,096 scheduled sailings, and 2,775 cancellations.
Despite the modest gains in ridership, WSF is running a reduced schedule for at least the next four years, and struggles to maintain service, especially during heavy, holiday travel.
WSF’s fleet troubles are worsened by the fact that 50 percent of deck and engine crew members are up for retirement in the next five years. WSF says it needs to hire 60 entry-level deckhands and 36 able seamen “every year in perpetuity” to restore normal service.
Beginning in 2028, WSF’s fortunes may begin to change. That year, the first of five hybrid-electric ferries could begin sailing, setting the state agency on a course to a 26-boat fleet with normal service.
The state’s nearly $4 billion plan to completely electrify the fleet by 2040 isn’t paid for through fare revenue. That project — which includes retrofitting six diesel ferries to hybrid electric, building 16 new hybrid-electric vessels and adding charging stations to 16 terminals — has $1.7 billion dedicated to it from the Move Ahead Washington transportation spending package and money generated by the state’s carbon market under the Climate Commitment Act.
Though approved more than a year ago, the fare increase follows a meeting last week of the state’s Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, which reported that the statewide transportation revenue forecast has decreased by $137 million for the 2023-25 biennium.
In September 2023, the projected ferry farebox revenue for the 2023-25 biennium was estimated at $396.6 million. With every three-month forecast, that number has fallen as the increase in ridership hasn’t been as great as expected. In June 2024, the forecast put the number at $375.1 million. In September, it was down to that number was reduced again, by nearly $6 million, to $369.2 million.
Halbert, with the commission, said the long-term forecast is in line with what the commission anticipated and so the expected fare revenue is still on target.
With fares covering 57 percent of operating costs, WSF has an enviable position compared with other regional transit modes. Fares for Sound Transit’s Link light rail system covered only 16 percent of operating costs in 2023. And fares for King County Metro’s buses covered less than 10 percent of what it cost to operate the buses in 2023.
