Bremerton ferry customers won’t have to wait 35 or 40 minutes to get off their boats for much longer. The ferry system and the City of Seattle are making a change to make the exit off Colman Dock much faster.

Due to recent changes to the construction detours on the waterfront for the seawall replacement project, Bremerton ferry customers were shifted to exiting only onto Yesler during certain times.

It happens at least four times a day when the Bainbridge ferry is also loading at the dock.

A KIRO Radio listener actually reached out to me after hearing my series on transportation choke points around our region to tell me about the long wait times. It’s so bad that he’s decided to drive around from Bremerton, through Tacoma, to Seattle because it’s faster than waiting at Colman Dock to get off the boat.

“When there are two boats at the dock, the Bremerton boat is directed solely out of Yesler, so oftentimes we don’t have enough green (traffic light) time to allow all that traffic to exit the dock in a timely fashion,” said Nicole McIntosh, terminal design engineering manager for the Washington State Ferries.

When Bremerton customers can exit using both Marion and Yesler Streets, the light stays green longer. The trigger light is on Marion. When cars are only exiting from Yesler, the light doesn’t get the message that there’s a boat at the dock. So you have several hundred cars trying to get through a very short green.

A new override system is currently being installed to allow ferry workers to trigger a longer green cycle at Yesler, manually.

Rick Sheridan, with the Seattle Department of Transportation, said the override will allow ferry workers to get a longer green for up to ten minutes. It won’t be green for ten minutes, but that’s how long the override will last.

“There aren’t any restrictions on its use, but as we install it over the course of the next week, we are going to tweak it and work with the operators at the terminal to make sure it doesn’t disrupt traffic moving north-south on surface Alaskan Way,” he said.

This new override system will cost the city $10,000. The money will come out of the construction budget for the seawall project.