The following letter was sent to Steamship Authority general manager Bob Davis.

The Steamship Authority is the lifeline to the Islands, and also too often a frustrating customer experience. Here are five things you can do quickly that will enhance the customer experience, while you pursue the larger fixes needed to address this year’s more major shortcomings.

• Include the freight boats in your published schedules. Unless you memorize when the freight boats run, you’d have to find them by creating a dummy car reservation via the reservation site, and then look at what boats are listed. Fixing this would be especially helpful to visitors, who are the lifeblood of MV’s economy.

• Label the shuttle bus lanes in Woods Hole. Although there is one sign, when coming from the main slip that indicates which lanes have buses that will go to which lot, it is easy to miss if it is crowded, you are distracted or you are coming from the other slip. Why not put the signs in the aisles between the buses where everyone would see them, or on the back of the buses? Again, this fix would be most helpful to visitors, the lifeblood of MV’s economy.

• Identify the destination ports more clearly. The sign at the secondary slip is located at the front of the walk-on passenger line, where it is blocked from view by all the waiting passengers. Please put another one where it can be seen when approaching from the bus. During all the construction and the frequent substitution of boats for one another, it is not obvious which boat is headed where.

• Time the buses to depart the lots to make the ferries, not miss them by a minute. I cannot tell you how many times my fellow passengers and I are furious after sitting in a bus at Landers, begging the driver to please depart so we can make the next boat, only to be told she or he can’t leave unless dispatch authorizes. It is nauseating to see that the boat I could have made sailing out of the slip, while I ready myself either to wait two and a half hours for the next boat to Vineyard Haven or to drop money on a taxi from Oak Bluffs to Vineyard Haven, which still gets you to Vineyard Haven 30 to 50 minutes later than you should have arrived.

• Get rid of the stupid new fare cards. I have a family of seven, so I have seven cards. It is impossible to keep track of how many rides are on each. Was this a move to discourage the use of commuting tickets? Seems like a waste of plastic cards, time and money. People I talk with get used to the other inconveniences, but everyone feels taken advantage of by this one.

Thank you for your consideration.

John Freedman

Newton and Chilmark