The Dash is back!
A passenger waits for the Kitsap Transit Fast Ferry Reliance at Pier 50 in Seattle.
UPDATE Dec. 8, 2022: We’ve added a Data Download tab to the dashboard, where anyone can download daily ridership data for each route. Select the route, year and month and click the “Export Ridership” button to download.
When a fast ferry is taken out of service for mechanical issues and we’re forced to cancel sailings, Kitsap Transit often hears this question on social media: Why does this happen so often?
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we pointed riders to our Fast Ferry Performance Indicators Dashboard (aka “The Dash”), which provided context for canceled sailings and an overview of the health of our service.
Today, we’re happy to announce the Fast Ferry Performance Indicators Dashboard has been relaunched with a fresh design and more user controls – and service reliability data shows that we typically complete 99% of our scheduled sailings each month.
We debuted the performance indicators dashboard in 2018 to inform the public about the status of our fast ferry service. Each month, we updated the dashboard with a boatload of statistics – ridership, on-time performance, service reliability, reasons for canceled sailings and passenger loads by sailing. In April 2021, we published statistics for February 2021 and then ceased updating the dashboard for more than 18 months. That hiatus was due to several factors, especially the COVID-19 pandemic.
Emerging and constantly shifting communication needs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with staffing shortages and turnover made it difficult to devote the time and resources necessary to update the dashboard consistently.
We launched our Southworth Fast Ferry service in March 2021. In the new dashboard, our trend charts begin with July 2021, soon after Gov. Jay Inslee dropped social-distancing restrictions on public transit, including ferries.
How does the dashboard work?
The performance indicators dashboard consists of four clickable tabs across the top: Overview, Bremerton, Kingston and Southworth.
Overview: The first tab highlights three top-level metrics – ridership, on-time performance and service reliability – systemwide, followed by charts that allow you to see trends for each metric over time.
Ridership is the total boardings on our fast ferries.
On-time performance is the percentage of each month’s scheduled sailings that arrived on time (defined as early or within 2 minutes of scheduled arrival time).
Service reliability is the percentage of scheduled sailings completed each month, followed by a chart showing the number of canceled sailings each month, grouped by cause (mechanical, environmental, and other). Hover over a bar to reveal the details.
In our redesigned dashboard, you can now toggle on or off individual routes to see the trends for a single route. Before, the performance metrics were only displayed at a systemwide level.
Specific Routes: See how full (or not) your desired sailing is for the most recent month or over a longer period of time by dragging the slider at the top. You can also hover over the bar chart and see the statistics for each sailing, by destination.
You’ll also see a percentage for “utilization,” which is the passenger count divided by the maximum capacity of the vessel operating that sailing.
Bonus: We frequently receive public-records requests for our fast-ferry ridership data. Now, requestors can go to our dashboard and download the data anytime they want. Here’s how to do it:
Select the tab you want to download data from.
At the bottom of the visualization, on the right-hand side, click on the Download icon.
Select Crosstab.
Select format (Excel, CSV)
Click the Download button.
We’re glad to be able to offer this resource to the community again. If you have any questions or comments about the dashboard, you can send them to marketing@kitsaptransit.com.