Numbers hint at how to avoid the impending Seattle Squeeze
Mar 23, 2019, 9:05 AM
It’s coming — the next Seattle Squeeze. But unlike the previous trial when the Alaskan Way Viaduct was shut down, this squeeze will start with hundreds of new bus trips added to downtown.
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More than 800 bus trips will be eliminated from the downtown transit tunnel on March 23. That accounts for 18,000 daily riders and 15 different routes that previously moved through the tunnel (which will now be reserved solely for light rail). The buses are expected to add more congestion between 2nd and 6th Avenues.
Seattle is officially entering what officials have called the “period of maximum constraint.” It’s a time when more buses move onto downtown surface streets, construction projects are peaking, the convention center is expanding, among other projects in the area. It’s expected to last years and cause massive congestion in Seattle, which is why the Seattle Department of Transportation considered how commuters handled the first Seattle Squeeze in January.
The first Seattle Squeeze
Ahead of change to the transit tunnel, SDOT released survey data on the last Seattle Squeeze, aka Viadoom, when the viaduct was taken away and the new SR99 tunnel had yet to open. This lasted three weeks. But the roads were relatively light, without the massive congestion many had feared. How did Seattle commuters achieve this?
An SDOT representative said that during the squeeze, Sound Transit saw a 14 percent rise in light rail use. The free waterfront shuttle service saw an increase of 11 percent. And King County Metro bus service experienced higher ridership during two of the three weeks. SDOT conducted a survey of city workers along with employees of several large downtown Seattle businesses. In short, “People drove less, took transit, and biked more.”
Looking just at the survey of city and other downtown employees (which is not strictly scientific), it appears that most chose to work from home, ditching cars and transit altogether. Other favored modes of travel were employer shuttles, or biking and walking.
SDOT notes that before the three-week squeeze, 12.5 percent of city employees had “alternative work arrangements,” aka working from home or flexing work hours. After the three weeks, 30 percent of city employees were participating in the program — 38 percent of those are in the downtown core. This appears to back up what KIRO Radio Traffic Reporter Chris Sullivan promoted as one solution to congestion — stagger start times.
SDOT also measured how many cars went into downtown Seattle over the three weeks and compared those numbers with the same counts in 2018. During Viadoom, drivers avoided downtown by the tens of thousands.
What was previously known is that bike ridership massively spiked during the squeeze. SDOT counted bike ridership along three major routes.
- Elliot Bay Trail: 191 percent increase from 2017, 44 percent from 2018
- Fremont Bridge: 176 percent increase from 2017, 79 percent from 2018
- Spokane Street Bridge: 327 percent increase from 2017, 164 percent from 2018
