It may take up to a year for Canadian authorities to determine why the Cat and the Lady Megan II collided in Yarmouth harbor last Friday, taking the life of a Nova Scotia fisherman. It should not take Maine nearly that long to reassess the place of high-speed ferries in its transportation planning.

This is, according to a proclamation signed by Gov. King in May, the Year of The Cat in Maine, the year in which 55-mile per hour runs between Bar Harbor and Yarmouth by “a ship from the 21st century” will provide a glimpse into a future when the entire Maine coast is linked by these ocean-going Concordes.

That future, based upon the last three months, does not look promising. Not just because Samuel Clifford Hood IV died when his fishing vessel was crushed under the Cat’s huge hull. Perhaps that outcome would have been no different had Bay Ferries heeded strong warnings from the U.S. Coast Guard that the Cat’s radar equipment and observation practices are inadequate for the prevailing local conditions of crowded harbors, small boats and heavy fog. And not just because the Cat has been cited three times for violating Bar Harbor’s no-wake zone, damaging small boats and injuring people. Perhaps that outcome will be different when the Cat gets skippers who do not take the dreadful in-your-face, extreme ferry ad campaign to heart.

The biggest problem with the Cat is not one of management style or employee attitude or even the recurring mechanical kinks. If the task at hand is to build a stronger economy through reliable and safe transportation — the usual goal of sweeping transportation initiatives — the Cat and all the Cat-like boats looming on the millennium’s horizon simply may not be the right boats for the job.

Tragedy aside, the important lesson learned from the Cat is that speed does not matter. The trip between Bar Harbor and Yarmouth on the leisurely old Bluenose took six hours, but it was an on-the-button six hours. The Cat could make the trip in two and a half. Maybe three, or three and a half. Or whenever. The promise of blazing speed is cold comfort to the tourist who finds himself dumped on the Bar Harbor dock at 4 a.m. Unreliability and interminable delays do not tend to generate repeat business.

Maine needs ferries, but more than mile-a-minute excursions for vacationers, Maine needs ferries that get Maine people where they need to go — from Isle au Haut to a high school on the Stonington mainland, for example, or from Lubec to a job in Eastport. Rural Maine is dying from a lack of modern transportation, whether by road, rail or sea. The Department of Transportation’s tourism-oriented strategic plan to create an intricate web of planes, trains, buses and Cats is the icing. Rural Maine needs the cake first.