Is exiting Sea-Tac’s cellphone lot a danger to drivers?
Jan 25, 2016, 10:33 PM | Updated: May 7, 2016, 10:34 pm
The cellphone lot at Sea-Tac Airport can be crammed, especially during the afternoon. But it’s not the congestion that has a listener from Anacortes concerned.
Vix from Anacortes is concerned about how people get out of the lot and how it could be confusing for first-time users or travelers.
If you haven’t used the lot, it is just off the airport expressway prior to the terminal. The lot is used by drivers waiting for friends and family members ready to be picked up. When they are ready, they call the driver in the cellphone lot, and the pick-up is arranged.
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To get to the terminal, you take a left out of the lot. It’s a simple green light, and despite multiple “Do not enter signs,” Vix worries someone could get confused and go straight, driving up the off-ramp. He believes there should be an arrow on the lights. Vix admits this might be super cautious, but he says he had a friend that was confused in a Colorado airport cellphone lot and was injured in a bad accident.
I ran his ideas past Sea-Tac spokesman Perry Cooper.
“We haven’t had any accidents of those kinds of descriptions,” Cooper explained. “It has worked well. We have four different signs on the intersection…That has not been a problem for us so far at this point.”
As for adding arrows to the green light, Cooper says they did look at making a turn-only signal, but that came with its own problems.
“You’re going to back up all of the traffic that’s waiting to get down from the airport expressway, and that’s actually going to impact all of the traffic coming in on the express way,” Cooper said. “So that’s a problem.”
The Port of Seattle’s study also found a turn-only light would also back up traffic to International Boulevard.
So it looks like this will stay a simple green light.
The one reported problem drivers do have with the cellphone lot is fighting their sense of direction.
“Intuitively, as soon as you turn left, you think ‘I’m going to go left again,’ because that’s where the terminal is,” Cooper said. “But down Air Cargo Road you have to turn right to on the express way to get to the garage and the terminal.”
Cooper says about 100 drivers a day mistakenly take a left down Air Cargo Road and run into the security checkpoint where they are turned around.
