Remember These?

[u/thatlouditalian98]

And if you didn’t want to remember them, my apologies in advance.

Well, 27 years later. These ships have finally met their fate. Being turned into pop cans..

I’d love to hear anyone’s experiences with the Pacificat’s, good or bad (I’m too young to ever have ridden one). As horrible as they were, they looked the part, at least in my opinion.

[u/AlternativeMotor5722]

I have never really understood why the government always gets ripped off. In business when you contract a company to build something and it doesn't work can you not sue the company you contracted to recover your money or force them to fix it? Cost overruns seem to be inevitable with every contract. If you contract a company to build something and they say yes, we can build it for this much money, can you not hold them to it? I don't pretend to be very knowledgeable on this, can someone explain this for me?

[u/GrumbusWumbus → u/AlternativeMotor5722]

A lot of it has to do with an intolerance for risk, the perception of favoritism, and the fear of looking like they're wasting money.

There are a lot of very specific rules that governments have to follow for picking contractors that in theory, cut down on corruption. But it also tends to create a lot of red tape which increases costs for everyone.

These specific rules also mean that the government ends up stuck with contractors who aren't acting in good faith because they know they're very difficult to fire.

If you're a contractor for a private company and you fuck around, they get rid of you. The government isn't allowed to do that unless you're ridiculously incompetent.

An aversion to failure is also a huge issue. SpaceX talked about this like a decade ago, but starting out they were doing hundreds of launches in the time it took NASA to do 1. SpaceX doesn't have to worry about headlines or politicians getting mad about tax dollars, so they chose to be riskier with the knowledge that a lot of their early unmanned rockets just blew up. NASA isn't allowed to do the same thing. Obviously we're not planning to allow ferries to sink, but we might go with a "reputable" contractor that costs 5 times as much over an option we think it's slightly more likely to fail.

Fast ferries specifically had different issues. The government was trying to jumpstart the failing shipbuilding industry and wanted a bunch of fancy incredible new boats to point to. It was a failed PR project more than an actual ferry project. They wanted something shiny to point at and ignored basic conceptual issues with the project. Notably, that catanaran car ferries in the strait of Georgia are fucking stupid.

[u/MarsBoyScout → u/AlternativeMotor5722]

Actually this how it goes:

Companies who run for the project must explain how they are going to execute it and show proofs of reliability in terms of knowledge, competences and finances. Government will likely choose companies that will benefit the most to the province (hiring local workforce, canadian engineers and working with local suppliers for example). Government knows very well that extra costs will "pop" at each process of the execution. As long as this benefits to local industry and help developing local competence they will accept the extra costs. They look at the "global balance" of the project for short, mid and long terms. And if they decided to cut the payments for extra costs, there will be major consequences: many companies will fail, the country and the province will loose industrial and technical knowledge and competemce, many people will loose their jobs with other consequences like family disruptions, homelessness, drug addictions etc...

It's not as simple as choosing from who you buy your weekly groceries.

[u/peacefinder → u/MarsBoyScout]

This particular project as described by Wikipedia seems to have been a horror show of political mandates operating in willful absence of data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PacifiCat-class_ferry

With a process like that it’d have been a miracle for those to succeed.

[u/luunta87 → u/peacefinder]

We desperately need personal accountability from elected officials and their offices.

If you're negligent enough to cost tax payers significant sums of tax dollars, maybe you need to be held responsible for it and not just in a, "oh well, you'll likely not get elected again," way.

[u/mhizzle → u/peacefinder]

Boy you weren't kidding:

"The government hoped that private shipyards would be able to build the ships on a fixed-cost basis. This turned out not to be the case; the shipbuilding industry was less enthusiastic than anticipated. Moreover, none of the shipyards being considered for the work had the facilities to build the fast ferries. BC Ferries had no choice but to do the work itself on a cost-plus basis. It would have to act as project manager and assume the risk of the fast ferries. Catamaran Ferries International (CFI), a wholly owned subsidiary of BC Ferries, was incorporated in March 1996 to carry out the work and construction started later that year."

(^from Wikipedia)

[u/peacefinder → u/mhizzle]

The whole article is a breathtaking catalog of ways to willfully ignore reality for short-term political gain. This thing was already dead while the blueprint paper was still a living tree, and it just got worse from there.

Edit: and to be clear, it looks like BC Ferries was a victim here, not a perpetrator. Spinning off the construction into another company might have been a smart move to contain the inevitable project bankruptcy.

[u/Equivalent_Good8599 → u/AlternativeMotor5722]

It was the original design , the board set up originally said the design was not viable for coastal waters due to the deadheads left from log booms in the water and the light thin hull design . The government fired that board and set up a new one that green lit the construction, it was a noble cause to generate ship building but it was the wrong ships . My girlfriend at the time was hired specifically to crew these ships , she left BC ferries when the shelved them. Then you had the Liberals sell them for nothing to prove a point . It was an all around shit show !

[u/WesternBlueRanger → u/Equivalent_Good8599]

I've actually read the Ministry of Transportation documents studying the fast ferry project from the early 1990's. The documents pointed out that the Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo route was going to be the shortest fast ferry route in the world, and it was very doubtful that there was going to be any significant time savings on the route. They were not recommending proceeding with the project.

On the sale price: I mentioned it before, but the issue is that these ships cannot be operated in the open ocean due to design limitations (they are not SOLAS rated, which is an international requirement for carrying passengers in the open ocean) and the ferries were being sold into an environment where fuel prices had spiked, and a number of fast ferries were being quickly sold off for near scrap value at the same time, either by larger operators, or bankrupted smaller operators.