Washington State Ferries Director David Moseley is becoming quite the permanent fixture in Kingston these days. He’s often in town pitching a plan and daring Kingston residents to dream of a Kingston free from ferry traffic.

His last stop was Tuesday evening for an open forum on the topic du jour: whether WSF should implement a reservation system for the Kingston/Edmonds ferry. The most solid argument is validated every time a ferry loads or offloads: Kingston becomes a parking lot with a pretty view. Because of the volume of traffic, two-hour wait times during peak season aren’t uncommon.

In the time it can take to bake a cheesecake from scratch, (possibly) run a half-marathon, do a black-belt sudoku or watch an entire movie, there you sit, waiting for a ferry.

“What if — and I’m serious about this — what if you didn’t have to do that?” Moseley asked a crowded room of ferry riders.

The problem with a reservation system — and let’s be honest about this — is for it to work, the ferries would have to be on time. The 12:10 p.m. ferry would have to leave at 12:10 p.m., just as the 3:10 p.m. ferry would have to leave at 3:10 p.m.

This rarely happens.

If a rider has to be in Edmonds at a particular time and makes a ferry reservation accordingly, and the ferry’s late, so are they. And if there are no reservations left for the next ferry?

A reservation system also would leave in the lurch those whose jobs are flexible, like Evelyn Schwerin, an on-call psychiatric nurse at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle (see the story on page 1). How can those on call make a reservation when they don’t know when they will need to hop on a ferry?

Unless the ferry reservation plan allows for some flexibility, it just won’t work.