The good, bad and ugly chokepoints of 2015 in the Puget Sound region
Dec 30, 2015, 11:31 PM | Updated: May 7, 2016, 11:33 pm
By far the worst chokepoint of 2015 has to go to the City of Seattle and it’s poor handing of the fish truck fiasco.
You remember this one from March. A fish truck overturned on Highway 99 near the stadiums. It caused a nine-hour traffic jam and forced the 7 p.m. kickoff for the Sounders game to be pushed to 7:23 p.m.
And then transportation director Scott Kubly told KIRO’s Dori Monson this:
“I think what the incident highlights is that we actually do a good job of incident response. We had to balance the need to move quickly, with the need to move responsibly and safe.”
But it turned out the city didn’t even have a plan for something like this and then admitted that fish trumped drivers’ time.
A close second was Chinese President Xi Jinping and the nightmare he created during his visit. The visit in September cost the City of Seattle nearly $1 million for the President’s three-day visit.
Related: 10 of the most frustrating offenses committed by Seattle drivers
Third on the list: all the emergency expansion joint repairs that destroyed our commutes.
One of them shut down I-405 between Bellevue and Renton. Mike Allende with the Washington State Department of Transportation says workers thought they could get it done in just a few hours, but the weather didn’t cooperate.
“We never like to do that,” he said. “We never like to see people wait in traffic. But it was a situation where, at that point, we would rather have that than put drivers in an unsafe situation.”
The repairs hindered the morning commute. It happened again on I-5 a few times, including one recently.
2015 was also the year of the Chick-fil-A chokepoint. Shortly after Chick-fil-A moved into Puget Sound, the roadways surrounding the restaurant jammed up. Bellevue got the worst of it with more than a month of jammed up streets around the new location.
The chokepoint that generated the most feedback, and will continue to do so, is the new tolling on I-405. There’s a petition to eliminate the express toll Lanes. The Legislature will consider bills to greatly reduce them. The state might ask to increase the maximum toll rates. This one isn’t going away.
Neither are road diets across the region as cities eliminate road lanes and parking to add protected bike lanes.
People are apparently still learning how to merge. They still don’t know when it’s OK to pass a school bus. Drivers are still camped in the left lane.
But with all the bad, there is some good.
Shoreline finished up 10 years of work on Aurora Avenue this year.
My prize for the best project goes to Everett, for opening Broadway Bridge more than three months ahead of schedule while building a new bridge over the railroad tracks.
Congrats to city engineer Ryan Sass on this one. Unfortunately, there is no trophy.
