Washington State Ferries: The Largest Ferry System in the United States

The vessel leaving Colman Dock right now, or the one due in the next thirty minutes, is part of a fleet of twenty-one ships running about ten routes across Puget Sound and the northern inland waters. Washington State Ferries moves approximately twenty million passengers per year. It is the largest ferry system in the United States, and it is the closest thing to a state road that connects mainland Seattle to the communities on the other side of the water.

For residents of Bainbridge Island, the forty-five-minute crossing to Seattle is not a scenic amenity. It is the commute. It is the trip to the grocery store when the island's own options run short. It is the school bus, in the sense that getting to the mainland for specialized medical appointments or cultural events requires planning a trip around the ferry schedule. The schedule runs roughly every hour during peak times; the last sailing is not midnight. If you miss the last ferry from the mainland to Bainbridge, you spend the night on the mainland or you find a more complicated route home.

The ferry as constraint shapes island life in ways that are not always obvious to visitors. The communities on Bainbridge, Vashon, Whidbey, and the San Juan Islands each have distinct political and cultural characters that are in part a product of who was willing to accept the forty-five-minute crossing as a permanent feature of daily life and who was not. The ferry filters for people who have made a specific choice about how they want to live. The choice tends to attract people of strong preferences.

The Washington State Ferries system dates in its modern form to nineteen fifty-one, when the state bought out the privately owned Puget Sound Navigation Company, which islanders had long called the Black Ball Line. The state took over the routes, the vessels, and the obligation. Seventy-five years later, the system is still the only road equivalent across a hundred and seventy miles of water.