Washington state ferries eye Wi-Fi (at Computerworld). Eric Sinclair pointed this out from Glenn’s 80211blog.

Sounds like they’re anticipating a subscription-based service rather than a free access or hourly access service, which is too bad from my perspective – it’d be neat to be able to use the ferries as an ‘office’ at whim.

That pricing scheme revs me up about the outrageous fare increases on ferries over the past year, actually – it was about $40 to the San Juans this summer and $30 for the Kingston run when Eric was in town.

If you’re gonna run the services on a full for-proft unsubsidized basis, you have to provide competition, something which has not even entered the discussion here in the state. State-sponsored utility-style provisioning can’t work unless the underlying premise of universal access is aggressively defended and defined to mean, well, universal access. The ferries, like our power rates, are undergoing a betrayal of public interest which serves no-one.

On the other hand, if the state yanks the rug out on the ferries and electrical power, I’m surely willing to extend this basic destruction of the fabric of our economy by extending the practice to our freeways. After all, only by completely destroying modern industrial economics can we properly correct our accelerated environmental destruction, eh?

No more subsidies for roads! An end to freeloading by the demon auto!