Lab 1 - Welcome to Seattle

 Persisting Trouble for Washington State Ferries

Seattle has a unique geography for such a large, ever growing city. Located on a strip of land between the Puget Sound and Lake Washington, Seattle is in some ways difficult to traverse or to even get to by typical modes of transportation. Public transportation access is increasing slowly, but a lot of the city’s population drives, and traffic in the city is a woe for nearly all residents who need to drive to get around. For those that live outside of the city, on some of the surrounding islands, the Washington State Ferry system is integral and recent vessel and staff shortages have put a dent in an otherwise dependable transit system that is still trying to recover from pandemic related losses. 

In order to analyze the current state of the ferry system, we chose to visualize ferry ridership over the last few years, making sure to include peak pandemic years for comparison. Recent news indicates that Washington State Ferries is facing unprecedented issues with staffing, fleet aging and ship losses to maintenance issues. Those that depend on reliable transportation across the Sound have much to be concerned about as the issues have only continued to persist. 

My group obtained our data from the Washington State Department of Transportation website. WSDOT collects data on ridership and capacity utilization for the ferry system to determine need, understand usage, and evaluate performance. We picked the Seattle - Bainbridge Island route and pulled out ridership numbers for 2018-2022. To visualize this data, we chose to use a Sankey diagram because it allowed us to present the data in a way that was easy to understand with a quick glance. We have six nodes, one for Seattle, the origin, and five for Bainbridge Island, the destination. Each of the five destination nodes represents a different year. The legend allows the viewer to quickly gauge which year had the highest number of riders and which had the lowest. 

Looking at the chart, it is apparent that ridership peaked in 2018 and has been slowly creeping back up to those numbers in the years since, with a severe dip in 2020. In the interactive version of the map, you can see the exact numbers represented by the individual flows, which helps a bit in understanding Seattle ferry usage. In terms of how effective this chart is in congruence with the story, I think we could maybe do a similar analysis but on the number of ships in service throughout the years since the ferry system became available for public use. That wouldn’t necessarily demonstrate a flow though, so it may not fit the parameters for this project. 

My group performed pretty well I would say. Everyone was very willing to take on responsibilities and help each other out. We spent a good chunk of time brainstorming ideas though, and I would almost say we spent too much time on just that part of the project. Had we settled on a topic quicker, we could have flushed out a single idea more and had it be more relevant to the story at hand. Otherwise, everything got done in a timely manner, and there weren’t any parts of the project that were overwhelming or too difficult. In terms of my role, I came up with the topic and story we settled on and assisted in troubleshooting and adding finishing touches to the infographic code. Going forward, a goal to keep in mind would be to keep it simple in the brainstorming process and divide responsibilities a bit more clearly to make sure everyone does an equal part and knows what their part is early enough to get it done.

References

Washington State Department of Transportation. "Ferry Ridership by Year." Washington State Ferries, 2022, https://wsdot.wa.gov/about/data/multimodal-mobility-dashboard/dashboard/WSF/ridership-utilization.htm. Accessed 16 Jan. 2024.

Staff, MyNorthwest. “More Trouble for Washington State Ferries: 38% of Vessels Are out of Service.” MyNorthwest.Com, 14 Nov. 2023, mynorthwest.com/3939113/washington-state-ferries-vessels-out-of-service/.

Theron Zahn, KOMO News Reporter. “Washington State Ferries Plans for Reduced Service amid Lack of Vessels and Crew.” KOMO, komonews.com/news/local/washington-state-ferries-contingency-plan-lack-of-vessels-ferry-boats-unprecedented-crew-shortage-mariners-crewing-bainbridge-island-vashon-seattle-bremerton-anacortes-boating-king-county. Accessed 24 Jan. 2024.