Seattle's traffic is 2nd-worst: City trails only L.A. in study

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Seattle is now No. 2 on a list everyone here would love to avoid, a list of the worst places in the United States for driving.

Los Angeles is rated No. 1, but otherwise there's no place in the country that does as badly as the Seattle area in handling traffic, according to new rankings prepared by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI).

Traffic cameras New King County traffic cameras have been placed at: • Woodinville-Duvall Road at Avondale Road. • Woodinville-Duvall Road at West Snoqualmie Valley Road, facing south. • Woodinville-Duvall Road at West Snoqualmie Valley Road, facing east. • Petrovitsky Road at 140th Avenue Southeast. • Petrovitsky Road/Carr Road at Highway 515, Benson Road. • Southeast 208th Street at Highway 515, Benson Road. Three other cameras will begin filming soon at: • 100th Avenue Northeast at Juanita-Woodinville Way. • 100th Avenue Northeast at Northeast 132nd Street. • Petrovitsky Road at 116th Avenue Southeast. Views from the cameras are at www.metrokc.gov/mycommute/.

The Seattle-Everett area had been in third place the last time the TTI ratings came out, in 1999. And for most of the 1990s, it was sixth.

"I believe it," said LaDonna Elvig, who chauffeurs her kids in the Mountlake Terrace and Lynnwood areas daily and whose husband commutes to a job in North Seattle.

"In good traffic, it takes 15 to 20 minutes," for him to get to work, she said. "In dead traffic, it can take as long as 1-1/2 hours. He usually leaves at 7:25 a.m. and doesn't get home until 6, to go a whole 15 miles."

Since 1987, the TTI ratings have provided standard indexes for measuring traffic congestion.

In the latest measurements, made public yesterday, Seattle ranked second in two of three main categories: a travel-time index and a calculation of annual congestion costs, expressed in both time and money. It ranked third in another category, a travel-rate index, behind Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The annual congestion costs put Los Angeles first, with a ranking of 56 hours a year lost per person in traffic jams and $1,000 wasted in fuel, while Seattle was put at 53 hours of delay and $930 a year in wasted fuel. (Atlanta's annual delay per person was also 53 hours.)

Congestion costs are based on how many hours people spend sitting in traffic jams and how much money is wasted on fuel from idling engines.

"What I like about the hours rating is it becomes tangible," said Greg Selstead, an engineer for the state Department of Transportation (DOT). He pointed out that the average Seattle driver wastes more than half of a two-week vacation in traffic jams.

The travel-time index is a comparison of how long it would take to get somewhere on wide-open highways and how long it really takes with peak-hour delays.

The results put Los Angeles as worst, with a travel-time index of 2.06, while Seattle got a 1.81. That means if it would take an hour to go someplace in Los Angeles on a wide-open freeway, the reality is that it takes a little more than two hours in rush-hour driving. In Seattle, it would take a little less than two hours.

The travel-rate index is a calculation of how long it would take to go someplace in normal driving conditions, recognizing there usually are some traffic delays, and then comparing that with rush-hour driving. That index put Los Angeles worst, with an index of 1.55, San Francisco at second with a 1.45 and Seattle third with a 1.44. That means if it normally takes an hour to get someplace in the Seattle-Everett area, it would take 44 minutes longer at peak hours.

Tacoma was listed separately in the TTI study. The travel-time index for that city was 1.46 (ranking 24th), the travel-rate index was 1.27 (22nd) and the annual delay for a Tacoma driver was 27 hours (37th) at a cost of $490 (ranking 36th).

The TTI, in its report on congestion in 68 urban areas, found that the average driver spent 36 hours a year sitting in traffic in 1999, up from 11 hours in 1982. Rush hour has grown to six hours a day, three hours a morning and three hours an evening - twice as long as in 1982.

All this congestion comes with a price: $78 billion a year in wasted time and burned gasoline, according to the institute, part of Texas A&M University.

Local drivers have tried to alter their lives to cope with congestion, changing where they shop, where they live and where they eat.

At Honeywell offices along 148th Avenue Northeast in Redmond, John McDonald, a radar-product manager, commutes nine miles from Woodinville and often car-pools with a friend.

He's found traffic has shaped his life in countless ways, adding hours of delay to what once were simple trips.

"It's taken me an hour to get from Woodinville to the mall in Lynnwood," he said. "Typically, if I need to go to Seattle, I'll go between 11 and 1. At other times, it'll take 1-1/2 hours. You just avoid doing that." If he has to take clients out to dinner, he says, he'll stay on the Eastside, rather than head for Seattle.

Jim Basel, who moved here 2-1/2 years ago from Kansas City to become an engineer at Honeywell, has taken steps to cope with traffic. One was where to live. He and his wife ended up buying a house in Renton, partly because his wife works there.

Once they'd settled, Basel soon found that Interstate 405 was not his route of choice.

"It'll take about an hour, this time of day," he said as he left work one afternoon. "It might take 50 minutes. I even go a longer way because the traffic on the freeway is so bad."

The route he uses takes him from his office in the Overlake area to West Lake Sammamish Parkway, along the west edge of Lake Sammamish, then to Newport Way, and finally to the Renton-Issaquah Road. That's a one-way trip of more than 22 miles, he says.

His route takes him through some neighborhoods that have complained of "cut-through" traffic.

"Every community goes out of its way to force traffic onto the freeways," Basel said, "so there are no alternatives. There are no throughways other than the freeways, and it doesn't work."

Basel doesn't believe politicians and other leaders have handled the transportation quandary very well or been able to act on possible solutions.

King County Executive Ron Sims cited the TTI study yesterday in announcing new county road programs.

"To say that the only place in the country that moves slower than King County is Los Angeles is not exactly a gold star in our crown," he said, adding that some 40 county highway projects costing $109 million would be undertaken over the summer. As part of the work, nine traffic cameras are being installed along key roads to allow drivers to check traffic conditions.

Sims also pleaded with the Legislature to find traffic solutions. "We have been waiting and waiting and waiting for state action," he said.

Many of the region's biggest transportation advances have taken place when floating bridges sank or others were hit by errant shipping, Sims noted.

The real problem with the tug hitting the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge last year, he said, "is that the pilot did not sleep long enough," inflicting damage that allowed the bridge to be repaired. If it had sunk, he said, it finally might have been replaced.

"We cannot have transportation planning by catastrophe," Sims said.

The TTI findings also contain comparisons of what solutions might end traffic jams but offer little hope for the Seattle-Everett area. New road construction alone - meaning new funding as well - just can't keep up, the study says.

And even if such suggestions as a $17 billion package of transportation improvements proposed by Gov. Gary Locke were adopted, it would take 10 years or more to carry them out.

The TTI study also finds that car pools would have to grow from 3 percent to 5 percent a year just to keep pace with increasing traffic loads.

And the region's main transportation project, a proposed light-rail system, already has moved from an expected completion date of 2006 to sometime after 2009 at the earliest.

Meanwhile, the DOT's Selstead notes that present Seattle-area transportation resources -- mainly highways - are saturated.

"There is no more capacity," he said.

Peyton Whitely can be reached at 206-464-2259 or at pwhitely@seattletimes.com. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.