Change for Change's Sake?
Tuesday, February 18, 2014 at 7:31PM I have noticed recently in a variety of venues that people sometimes make changes, simply for the sake of making them. In the current options facing Thetis Islanders, it appears that the Ferries Option 2 appears to be tinkering massively with the schedule simply because they can, without fully understanding the ramifications from their offices in Victoria.
Unfortunately none of the options incorporate either of the Thetis grown ideas that were developed with much thought and carefully on several occasions to the government agencies involved in deciding our ferry schedule…the idea of triangle runs, or the idea of dropping a run or two and going more slowly. So we are left without a really good option and will be forced to choose from the three before us.
The Provincial option leaves us with a mostly intact schedule that incorporates equitable school runs (one short and one long run for each island), retains later ferries in the evenings for travellers from the mainland and theater/dinner goers and retains the option of morning or full days offisland through the retention of regular sailing to Thetis Island throughout the day. It does, however create a concern for the 6:20 commuters. If this option is chosen with comments added to make the 5:00 a little later and the 7:25 a little earlier, even the commuters can be accommodated and we have a simple solution that causes minimal disruption. Following the KISS principle, this bears serious consideration.
Ferries Option 1 is similar, and leaves us with our current functioning ferry schedule through most of the day, and incorporates all the benefits of option 1 above EXCEPT there is no longer a 1020 pm ferry. Hmm, seems we lose some versatility amongst our access options with this option.
Ferries Option 2 creates the concerns of longer travel times for Thetis students, no 1020 pm ferry, and inadvertently creates a long window right in the middle of the day where it is impossible to get home after a morning of shopping/medical/errands. The 1140 run is too early to be useful to Thetis residents doing errands offisland, yet the return run is a popular run for Penelakut to travel to Chemainus. The 1245 is extremely well utilized so there appears to be no reason to move it significantly, yet that is what will happen if option 2 is implemented. It will switch the 1140 Penelakut direct run with the 1245 triangle. This appears to be an attempt at a triangle type schedule, and yet it is not…it simply tinkers by flipping round trips with direct trips with no real benefit for residents. In the case of the 1140 and 1245 runs it appears to benefit no one, except perhaps a handful of commercial vehicles (maybe) at the inconvenience of a larger number of residents and tourists. In summer, the 1245 on Friday is the start of the weekend commuter traffic, which will now have to cram onto the next ferry along with whatever additional traffic has arrived in the interim, creating even heavier and later backlogs on Friday afternoon and evenings. With the necessary addition of a litany of comments to equalize the student’s travel time, comments to to revert the 1140 and 1245 runs to their previous order this option appears to be convoluted and may require require several comments to achieve the results presented by the simplicity of the government option and option 1.
As Thetis Islanders, understanding the options before us is a challenge, and I hope that my thoughts on this matter, along with Veronica’s mapping out the options before us will be helpful to some.
Carol Swann
