Traffic Storms

By Dave Fox

April, 2001

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer attempted to enlighten readers recently with the following front-page headline:

Ooh! Newsflash! Traffic in Seattle is a mess!

The article also contained this highly useful information: "Traffic jams may be a recurring nightmare for the next month."

Here is a correction: Traffic jams may be a recurring nightmare in Seattle for the next 273 years.

For those of you who don't live here, Seattle has been ranked as having the third worst traffic in America after Los Angeles and New York City. Of course, third worst is a matter of perspective. I personally am not bothered by traffic in LA or New York as I drive to work in the morning.

But the P-I was reporting on extra bad traffic. One commuter interviewed in this article reported it took her 45 minutes to drive four and a half blocks.

The cause for the snarl was belated earthquake damage. The Alaskan Way Viaduct is a double-decker roadway similar to the one that pancaked during a big quake in Los Angeles a few years ago. It's considered a very unfortunate place to be when the earth moves.

After our 6.8 earthquake February 28, the viaduct was shut down for a day so engineers could make "emergency repairs." After the engineers made these emergency repairs, they declared the viaduct safe.

Several weeks later, a big chunk of metal fell, nearly squishing a mother and her baby.

Oops.

So the road was closed again for more emergency bandaging. And people complained that it wasn't open in time for rush hour. As if we needed another hurried repair job.

Seattle traffic has been a nightmare for the last decade. I'm told I am part of the problem, having had the audacity to get a job here in 1996. Living here, one gets used to the traffic though - sort of like Greenlanders get used to living in -60 degree wind chills for months on end. But every now and then, something happens to cause exceptionally nightmarish traffic, even by Seattle standards.

Take, for example, the time a fugitive holed himself up in a house that happened to be right next to I-5. He was firing shots at random, and the cops had no choice but to close the highway. Traffic flooded the side streets, and some motorists reported taking six hours to get home from work.

Then there was the more recent incident in which an extremely clever prankster decided to shout from his truck to a Metro bus driver that there was a bomb on the bus. The bus was on one of two floating bridges that connect downtown to the east suburbs over Lake Washington. Police closed the bridge for several hours to investigate.

These two bridges combined are not enough to handle rush hour traffic effectively. If you happen to be trying to cross the lake when they close either one of them, you might as well climb in the back seat and take a nap.

Yes, every now and then, something happens in this city that brings traffic to its gridlocked knees. I call these moments traffic storms.

There's a reason Seattle gets traffic storms: The weather here is boring.

Growing up in Maryland, we had hurricanes and blizzards. In Wisconsin, there were tornadoes and bitter cold spells. Seattle just has rain.

Every now and then we need something to bring our lives to a grinding halt. It puts things in perspective and teaches us how small we are in the universe. We need things in life to mess up our schedules, to make us late, and remind us that ultimately we are not in control. People complained about getting home from work late, but how many of them thought about the lady who almost got whacked on the head by the falling piece of viaduct?

We need traffic storms in Seattle. Otherwise, save for the occasional riot, life here would be dreadfully uneventful.