If you read the seattlest post, he based his sales-tax charging on his MVET charging, and this made sense to him since he runs his business from his home. He didn’t visit the state’s sales tax site.

What about augmenting the current ferry system with train ferries that provide service to Bainbridge, Kitsap, and the OP?

Once a short ferry ride to Bainbridge or Kingston, followed by a pleasant ride through a half-dozen towns and into rural country, today the commute is a nightmare, from long waits at the ferry terminal (“guess this one is full, maybe the next boat”) to non-stop congestion all the way up to Port Angeles. I don’t know how commuters put up with it.

A few years ago, the state had its own predictable solution: solve congestion by building bigger car ferries, whose increased capacity would require bigger ferry terminals, wider access roads to the terminals, and eventually a wider highway all the way up to Port A. Naturally, the ensuing development would not be concentrated in a traditional town setting, but would string along the entire road, a few blocks deep and 70 miles long.

Some in metropolitan Seattle (such as Ron Sims) saw the Kitsap as an outlet for overcrowding in King County, an odd concept considering that the peninsula is unbridgeable where it is closest to the huge population centers of Puget Sound, while roads to the mainland are only feasible in narrow corridors to the south and west, which are relatively unpopulated. And how would governments sustain initial growth over the long term, given the trickly terrain of what is, after all, a peninsula?

We already have a budding commuter rail system here on the eastern shores of Puget Sound-one that is slated to grow substantially in capacity-why not augment that with a commuter railway line across Kitsap and the North OP?

For someone going west, you would take Sounder to either an existing ferry terminal downtown or Mukilteo, or perhaps a new facility in the Port of Seattle. The cars are loaded, jacked up, the ferry makes the short hop across the sound, and the process is reversed. I imagine loading and unloading eight rail cars is a lot faster than loading and unloading 200 cars and trucks, which means trips could be more frequent, wait times non-existent, and travel unimpeded. Better yet, there’s no intermodal change overs once you board the OP commuter train downtown; at the ferry stops, you never have to leave the rail car. Once the train set has been re-organized at Eagledale or Kingston, you’re off to Poulsbo, Port Townsend, Sequim, and Port Angeles.

Now, I don’t have knowledge of traffic flow studies in those areas, but this approach would seem to
-bear the majority of commuter traffic
-handle tourism that is direct to Port Townsend, et. al
-augment existing ferry and commuter rail systems
-provide both Kitsap and the OP a sustainable link to the heart of commerce in the state
-act as an “organizing principle” for development, i.e. development would center around stations, with all the benefits that entails. The west Sound would have its own, toned-down version of the Urban Village concept. This is especially true if places like Port A had their own “small town tram” running in the city center. Imagine old town Port Angeles or Port Townsend with a robust tram circulator…it would be like Savannah, GA on steroids.

Amazingly for someone who has spent hours in congestion trying to get between Port Angeles and Bainbridge, the actual distance is only 70 miles (roughly)…and that can be quickly and easily traversed by a commuter train with a handful of stops.

What do you think? All-Aboard the OP commuter…

The MVET system is flawed, but only because it requires a lot of obscure mapping that generally gets eyeballed and not determined based on GIS location coding. It’s a futz that needs to be fixed, but mainly the fault of the resident for lack of diligence. It’s somewhat similar to the problems with shopping between Oregon and Washington– technically, Oregonians don’t have to pay tax, but it’s often collected anyway until the error is pointed out. It’s a grey area and requires diligence on the part of the resident themselves.