In a Pickle and a Jam

Most weekday mornings follow the very same pattern. I wake up around 6 AM. I have almost an hour and a half to check listings, look for any interesting articles, read the latest real estate news, pick the articles I feel like sharing and take a peek in my email. I like those morning hours, just Martha and I, usually undisturbed.

Starting at 7:30 AM my world is filled with spilled milk, hair brushes, toothpaste, library books, homework that still needs to be signed, lost glasses, lost shoes and giggles. It’s noisy and somewhat messy, but eventually we will be walking to the bus stop or sitting in the car. Kids to school, mom on the road.

If you’re new to Seattle, or if you don’t live in the area to begin with, this is when we enter the tricky part – traffic. Yes, everywhere in the world – at least pretty much – there is a morning rush hour and then in the evening we repeat. However, when you live in an area that has been rated 6^th worst in North America, and #53 in the entire world, things tend to get interesting when you’re trying to get from one place to another. If you just look at our evening peak, we will land on the 3^rd place, right behind Mexico City and Los Angeles way ahead of places like San Francisco, New York, Paris or London. So, if you thought traffic around here is bad, you were right. It is.

https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/trafficindex/list?citySize=LARGE&continent=NA&country=ALL

My way to the office starts on my iPhone as I’m trying to pick the best route. I use the WSDOT app but there are many others. I don’t want to be routed, I just want to see what the roads look like. Are they yellow, orange or red. My goal is to get to the office in 30 minutes. I don’t have to take a freeway, well I couldn’t, even if I wanted to.  Sometimes 30 minutes is doable, on others there is no chance, and there have been times when I’ve spent nearly an hour driving those 7 miles. On a really, really, really good day, I’ll make it in 20 minutes.

Seattle area has changed over the years, and as the metropolitan area keeps rapidly growing, the attempts of managing the increased traffic are falling short. It does not help that there still are nightmarish intersections like the one where SR-520 ends in a traffic light prior to turning into Avondale road. Who ends a freeway into a traffic light? Obviously, it must have seemed like a good, or at very least a bearable resolution at some point. I do still remember the time, when SR-520 went down to 2-lanes before ending in that very same intersection with lights, and this is way better. Even if it helped only for a couple of years. Or how about the intersection on I-405, the one where some are merging on the freeway from SR-520, and others are trying to get into downtown Bellevue. To me it’s quite surprising that we seem to manage with fender benders and minor injuries in that spot most of the time. Just think about it… merging from one freeway to another only to hit traffic merging off the freeway.

When looking at this mess, one must remember, that in 1960 Seattle Metro had approximately 1.4 million residents. According to 2016 census there were 3.8 million residents in the metro area. 2016 was 2 years ago, and I believe it to be a valid question to ask, if we have broken the 4 million residents by now. With King County growing by over a 1,000 people every week, we must have. The network of freeways and roads was never built for this. For example, I-5 was completed in 1969, the first SR-520 floating bridge was opened in 1963 to replace ferry traffic across the lake, and the section going from Bellevue to Redmond in 1980’s when there were 2.1 million residents in the metro area. The new 520 bridge is partially completed but the last phase managing traffic in the West end of the bridge is yet to start its first phase.

The other major factor is the geography and topography of our area. With mountains on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, the area is limited to a narrow corridor from North to South. That corridor is then split by two large lakes. It would likely help if the area was flat, but instead it is formed by countless hills with valleys and canyons in between.

Yes. Someday we will have light rail to hopefully take some of that pressure off our overcrowded freeways, that have nowhere to expand. However, the underlying question remains, whether it will be enough by the time it is completed?

https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-news/seattle-traffic/traffic-flow

During peak traffic in the evening there are days when driving from Redmond to Seattle can take you almost twice the time it should, and one can easily spend a couple of hours in the car trying to get through the metropolitan area passing from North to South or the other way around. You wanna try getting to Ikea on a weeknight? How about an event in Seattle? Well, make sure you have plenty of time.

Anyone local steers away from the roads during peak traffic times, unless you absolutely have to be there. I mean, there are enough people that have to be at work or school at a certain time. I used to drive to my workplace in Bellevue at the crack of dawn – preferably before 7AM – to avoid traffic. My spouse works from home in the mornings until the traffic eases off. Equally one tries to schedule every aspect of their life, not just work, around this monster; appointments, events, eating out, kids’ activities… everything happens in a funky relation with traffic. 

https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-news/seattle-traffic/traffic-flow

Graphs and stats are provided by TomTom