Traffic study confirms fewer people commuting to work
Mar 10, 2020, 1:01 PM | Updated: Oct 8, 2024, 7:33 am
Traffic in downtown Seattle. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
A recent analysis showed that as more people have started working from home amid Washington’s coronavirus outbreak, traffic has trended dramatically downward.
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Metromile revealed Tuesday that traffic in the Seattle area has decreased every day since Sunday, March 1. Traffic started to dip dramatically though after March 4, when King County urged employees to work from home in a bid to curb the spread of coronavirus in the workplace.
Amazon made the move recently to have all of its Seattle employees telecommute for the rest of March, with Microsoft and Facebook enacting similar strategies.
Those decisions had traffic across March 5 to March 7, Thursday to Saturday, dipping almost 10 percent on each day.
Saturday, March 7, also had the fewest amount of vehicles on roads in the area for any day in the last five weeks.
The region has continued to see this downward trend in commute times on routes notorious for their stop-and-go traffic on normal mornings.
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On March 5 — when traffic in the Seattle area first began to dip dramatically — the commute from Everett to Seattle bottomed out under 40 minutes in the heart of morning rush hour. Quick commute times have persisted over the last week.
“You just don’t get a 40 minute travel time from Everett to Seattle or Bellevue between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. without something significant going on,” said KIRO Radio Traffic Reporter Chris Sullivan.
That persisted Tuesday, March 10, when the Everett to Seattle travel time during rush hour was a speedy 36 minutes. Meanwhile, Lynnwood to Bellevue was just 16 minutes, Federal Way to Seattle was 40 minutes, and Renton to Bellevue was 26 minutes.
Light #drivetimes continue into the later part of the AM commute.
Everett➡️Seattle: 36/29 mins
Lynnwood➡️Bellevue: 16/16 mins
Federal Way➡️Seattle: 40/25 mins
Renton➡️Bellevue: 26/11 mins
AND it's not raining, I'll take it! pic.twitter.com/mny2PSywzH— WSDOT Traffic (@wsdot_traffic) March 10, 2020
Metromile took its data from a sample size of 7,500 vehicles between Feb. 1 and March 7, 2020.
