Season Recap The Islands have long felt ambivalent about summer visitors, happy for the dollars they bring to a highly seasonal market, less so about the attendant traffic and congestion. After Labor Day come the familiar questions: Was it busier than ever, or did it just seem so? Have we turned another corner on the economy? Are we reaching a tipping point, when the things we love about the Vineyard are at imminent risk of being spoiled?

That these are perennial questions doesn’t make them less important.

The first question may be the easiest to answer, though even here the data is incomplete. The Steamship Authority, which accounts for the majority of people coming to the Island, reports that more than one million passengers were carried to and from the Island in the past three months, while 148,000 cars made the trip. That is about 28,000 more passengers and 4,200 more cars than during the summer of 2014. (The numbers include travel in both directions, which complicates any analysis.)

The five-year trends are also on the upswing, with the number of people and cars carried by ferries in the summer months increasing by an average of about 16,000 and 2,000 per year respectively. These are not insignificant numbers. No doubt the number of people who arrive here on commercial and private jets and other marine vessels has also been on the rise.

But at least on the ferries, traffic to and from the Island hasn’t yet reached the peak years of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Longer-term residents will remember 1998 as the year that Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket both called on the Steamship Authority to impose a one-year moratorium on expanding passenger service to the two Islands.

“Many feel we are losing what made this place so special by the number of people who are on this island,” Noel Berry, the Nantucket business owner who launched the successful effort, said at the time.

As the Steamship Authority prepares to rebuild its Woods Hole terminal, there are concerns not only from Island residents but from many on the mainland who worry about erosion of their own quality of life from the heavy traffic passing through.

Here on the Island, there is renewed sentiment that a conversation that lost momentum during the national recession needs to be rekindled. Serious concerns about traffic and the ability of the Island to deal with it surfaced in a survey released earlier this summer by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. Noted author Geraldine Brooks put it this way in a comment on the Gazette website this week: “The traffic jams in West Tisbury on Saturday and Menemsha Harbor every night, the absolute crush at the Farmer’s Market and the circus on Menemsha beach at sunset — this is not the peaceful, bucolic place that has lured people and made us fall in love with the Vineyard.”

Her question, “Who else feels that this summer was a tipping point?” received scattered agreement online, but it deserves a larger forum and more discussion.

As we leave the summer behind, there will be time for that.