Seattle Transportation Department to briefly pretend it cares about drivers

The Seattle Department of Transportation is finally pretending to care about the insane traffic congestion on the ‘Mercer Mess,’ finally decided to invest in signal synchronization technology that’s being used elsewhere in the state.

SDOT instituted a number of infrastructure changes on and around Mercer that has made traffic demonstrably worse, even creating long backups on weekends where they didn’t always exist. For example, you now have bus- and streetcar-only lanes on Westlake, which prevent drivers from turning right onto Mercer (when traveling southbound) and left or right on to some side streets (so if you’re trying to get to Mercer driving southbound, you’re pushed further onto now-congested side streets).

But one issue that has been a total nightmare is signal synchronization – in that, they’re not really synchronized. I mean, we’re told they are, but they don’t work. If you try to turn onto Mercer from any side street, you often have a green when Mercer is completely full. So you either break the law and stay in the intersection blocking traffic, or you just hang out until there’s an opening (that will come if you wait a good 30 minutes unmoved).

Anyone who actually drives the route (or even pretends to understand the driving experience) would see the problem, but our City Traffic Engineer, Dongho Chang, doesn’t drive and is actively cheering on instances where SDOT takes away opportunities for drivers to get around town.

To pretend to alleviate this issue, SDOT is investing one million dollars for new technology. Well, it’s not new – it’s new to Seattle. It’s already been in use around the state, but SDOT didn’t make this a priority for one of the most congested streets in the city. I’m assuming they were busy installing another parklet no one uses.

But this will offer limited help because of the infrastructure problems. SDOT’s Mark Bandy told KOMO TV that the technology won’t help during rush hour but it “may” help people get to and from I-5 faster during non-rush hour times. I suppose that’s a start. But their goal is to spend this one million to use as a future talking point that they care about traffic congestion and the driver experience and they’re willing to make investments. Meanwhile, they’ll spend ten times that, ten times over, creating a city of transit-only lanes and protected bike lanes for empty street cars and 3.4% of the commuters to bike on, while the rest of us are stuck in traffic.

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