As more Seattle-area employees returned to the office last year, the city’s roadways got significantly more clogged with vehicles.
Congestion jumped 9% in 2024, meaning that drivers lost 63 hours on average to traffic delays, up from 58 hours the year before. That’s according to the 2024 Global Traffic Scorecard released today by transportation analytics company Inrix.
Traffic snarls cost individual drivers in Seattle an estimated $1,128 in lost time and productivity.
The slowdowns landed the Seattle metro area in the No. 10 spot for worst congestion in U.S. cities — the same ranking as last year.
And the trend towards increased traffic — particularly on Mondays and Fridays — is almost certain to continue as Amazon’s full-time return-to-office policy kicked in last week.
The Seattle-based tech giant initially called employees back to the office three days a week in May 2023, and by the next month Inrix data showed that traffic had slowed on major commute routes, mostly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays when workers were onsite.
Amazon is the city’s largest employer with roughly 50,000 workers in Seattle, and an additional 12,000 in neighboring Bellevue.
Other major Seattle-area employers such as Starbucks have recently started enforcing strict return-to-office policies.
Remote work has been on the decline, with work-from-home rates overall dropping 19% in Seattle from 2022 to 2023, according to U.S. Census data cited by Inrix.
While commutes aren’t the main reason people travel, work-related driving does clog the system, said Bob Pishue, scorecard author and transportation analyst for Kirkland, Wash.-based Inrix.
“It’s more that you’re adding cars to the road network at the same time, in the same place — that triangulation of it — versus just more cars on the road,” he said.
Seattle gets hit harder by work travel because of a highly concentrated amount of employment in its downtown area, Pishue said. Some 10% of the city's jobs are in downtown — a fraction on par with only a few other metro areas including New York and San Francisco. A city like Atlanta, for example, has just 3% of its jobs in its downtown.
Seattle is also hemmed by Puget Sound to the west and pocked with large lakes, constraining travel corridors, and is living with decisions made in the 1960s and '70s to cancel highway construction projects. Only in recent years has the city opened light rail lines to meet some of the growing transportation demand.
"We're only the 16th-biggest metro, but we have some of the worst traffic versus Houston or other much larger cities and metro areas that have less congestion," Pishue said.
From 2022 to 2023, the city's transit use rose 24% and car commuting went up 7%. But compared to pre-pandemic levels, bus and other transit alternatives were still down 46% in Seattle in 2023.
That data, however, likely started changing last year as the region's commuter light rail system opened additional stations north and east of Seattle.
The Washington State Department of Transportation this spring is embarking on a major, three-year project to improve Interstate 5. The $203 million "Revive I-5" initiative will close stretches of highway for resurfacing, drainage improvements and other work.
"Travelers who use I-5 should anticipate significant traffic back-ups when the double-lane work zone begins in spring 2025," warns the DOT site.
That's likely to make light rail and other transit options more appealing to commuters — but there's also a chance that light rail could be maxed out by users as the system is not overly large, Pishue noted.
Other tech hubs are also seeing increases in return-to-office figures and rising traffic jams. San Francisco saw its work-from-home number drop 24% from 2022 to 2023. Traffic congestion in the region rose 2% last year.
https://ift.tt/Mx0hPbI January 06, 2025 at 05:01AM GeekWire
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