Why I-90 ‘car-mageddon’ didn’t materialize
Jul 25, 2014, 12:05 PM | Updated: 12:45 pm
If you feel a big wind blowing around the region, it could be the collective sigh of relief from the Washington State Department of Transportation because the widely feared “car-mageddon” from the big I-90 construction project never materialized.
Despite dire warnings of miles long backups, congestion was surprisingly minimal during the weeklong project as crews closed three westbound lanes to replace expansion joints.
“At one of the peak periods we saw 60 percent of vehicles avoiding westbound I-90,” said Bart Treece, WSDOT spokesman. The longest average travel time was recorded on Monday morning, July 21, when it took drivers 34 minutes to travel from Issaquah to Seattle.
So where did everyone go?
“Some folks chose to telecommute, some folks decided to get on the bike, some folks ended up carpooling. People had choices and we saw traffic was down across the entire region,” Treece said.
“We even heard that people were boating across the lake,” said WSDOT Northwest Region Administrator Lorena Eng.
Getting the word out early and often played a big part in helping minimize the impact of the project. Treece said WSDOT aggressively used a number of different strategies in addition to traditional media outreach, including a heavy push on its own social media channels and blog.
“It’s no longer just a press release. We connected with a lot of the commute trip reduction groups that work with a lot of carpools and some of the bigger employers in town. We connected with out transportation partners,” he said.
Clearly, it worked. And some might wonder if WSDOT would consider biting the bullet and doing more concentrated construction projects like the I-90 work instead of spreading closures throughout a number of nights and weekends during the summer.
But Treece said despite the relative success of last week’s project, extended closures are the last thing WSDOT wants.
“We try to avoid impacting traffic at the peak periods. If we can avoid having lanes closed on the highway when people are going to and from work, we’re going to try and do that. With this project, there was really no good way of doing that.”
A number of other construction projects and closures continue through the summer. Crews will again to close SR 520 in both directions from Friday Aug. 8 to Monday Aug. 11 for the bridge replacement project. Other work is scheduled around the region as well, but the good news is we survived another “car-mageddon.”
