PORT TOWNSEND — The proving ground for electronic ferry system ticketing — Port Townsend’s ferry terminal — made some technological advances late last week when ticket-purchasing kiosks and ticket card scanners were launched.
“We hope to have Port Townsend done with everything launched and running well by sometime in June,” Washington State Ferries spokeswoman Susan Harris said.
“Then we’ll move on to the San Juans.”
Harris said ferry officials believe the entire Puget Sound state ferry system’s electronic ticketing system, called Wave2Go, will be running by year’s end.
The system will be phased in at all other terminals, beginning with Anacortes-San Juan Islands, then the Seattle runs to Bainbridge Island and Bremerton to follow this summer.
The Kingston-Edmonds run is expected to be launched in late summer or early fall, Harris said.
Buy tickets online
Perhaps the highest hope of the electronic-ticketing project tested in Port Townsend and Keystone, is that passengers buy their tickets online at www.wsdot.wa.gov/ferries, clicking on the Wave2Go icon.
Harris said she believe Internet ticket purchasing should go online in June in the form of a “Web store.”
Like most testing, she said, some electronic quirks in the system have had to be fine tuned and working right.
“The problems we had early on were with the handhelds [computer scanners] used by dock workers,” she said.
“We’re still testing.”
