Booming population growth creates headaches on I-5 between Everett, Marysville

In KIRO Radio’s Chokepoints series, we take a closer look at the traffic issues plaguing commuters in the Puget Sound region.

People driving north out of Everett to Marysville are more than familiar with how I-5 gets completely bogged down there, everyday, for no apparent reason. There are no on-ramps, just five miles of flat land that is bumper to bumper.

Concern over this chokepoint comes from Trever, who wrote, “I don’t understand why this happens like clock work. It sometimes takes an hour to travel the ten miles from the Everett Mall to Marysville. Please help.”

It’s an area that I routinely hit, too, and it drives me crazy. I’m always looking for an accident or a stall but find nothing.

So we asked WSDOT why this is happening, and the simple answer is population growth.

“You’ve got a lot of folks entering the system, and there’s really no discharge point, if you will, from I-5 until you get all the way up to SR 528,” said Travis Phelps with the Washington State Department of Transportation. “A lot of those folks are Marysville-bound. Marysville has grown by leaps and bounds over the past ten years.”

“Leaps and bounds” doesn’t even come close to describing Marysville’s growth. It’s been an explosion. The city has nearly doubled in size since 2009 to more than 62,000 people.

Washington’s population grew by about 14 percent in the last 14 years. Marysville is pushing 140 percent growth.

There are just too many cars for the road.

Is there anything the state can do to relieve congestion through this area?

Phelps said there is a plan already on the drawing board that could help out a lot. “One of the things we are working on with the City of Marysville is trying to (create) a little relief point – that’s putting a northbound off-ramp at SR 529, giving folks another way to get into Marysville east of the railroad tracks,” Phelps said.

This would be a new exit from I-5 that could siphon off some traffic from the freeway.

According to Phelps, the idea is a long way from reality. “We’re still in very early stages here, so the project and its entire scope is not quite solidified yet, but that should help give a little relief to I-5,” he said.

So to Trever and the rest of you who will be stuck in that chokepoint today, you can have hope that something might eventually be done about it.