by AL DIMOND

Mercer Mess traffic

Mercer Mess traffic by Oran Viriyincy

A few weekends ago, I forgot to check the construction and traffic alerts before getting in my car and got stuck in one hell of a traffic jam on Aurora Ave N, headed south toward downtown Seattle from Greenwood. Highway 99 was closed from Valley through the Battery Street Tunnel yet I, unaware of what was going on, failed to plan and drove right into an complete standstill, made worse by the difficulty of exiting the road south of the exit to Dexter.

Maybe such a failure of planning is to be expected for some portion of normal drivers. But when I came home and checked how the bus routes on Aurora were being rerouted I was surprised to see they were staying on 99 all the way down to Valley! That’s several trips per hour, on routes that use Aurora for its speed, moving few people very slowly. Watching King County Metro and the state and city transportation departments fail as badly to plan as I did was hard to take.

When severe congestion makes transit severely unreliable, people who absolutely must get where they’re going are more likely to drive, making the congestion even worse. People considering optional trips are more likely to stay home, causing economic impacts in the area and generally frustrating people’s desires, making them less happy. Mass transit has the ability to use road space very efficiently, to provide more trips with less congestion. But people have to be willing to take it; there has to be an incentive.

This is, of course, the reason we’ve added bus lanes on Aurora and parts of 520, and will be adding more. It’s the reason we need to add bi-directional bus lanes on I-5 all through Seattle, and on the route the West Seattle buses will take after the Viaduct comes down. And it’s the reason we need bus lanes through construction zones.

That weekend there was a hard bottleneck at Aurora and Valley and only a limited number of vehicles could get through. But if we had maintained a bus lane all the way through the bottleneck we could have made the most of that limited number of vehicles. We didn’t. It was miserable. And we aren’t, by any current plans, going to maintain bus lanes through the long-term bottleneck caused by Mercer West construction, and that will be miserable, too.

There are other things I could quibble with. A lot of people diverted from Aurora down Fremont Avenue yesterday. I’m not sure they realized they could have stayed on Aurora across the Aurora Bridge and exited down to Dexter before hitting the really awful backup. As for Fremont Avenue itself, traffic signals at 39th and 35th continued to heavily favor cross traffic, causing backups at least as far up as 43rd at times. SDOT really should have a standing plan to alter signal timings and help out Fremont Avenue on days when it turns into a major through route.

A more serious quibble is sidewalk closures near the Mercer West work. Interrupting the already meager pedestrian network in this area even further is a blow to transit effectiveness, and can only result in more people either driving or staying home. More congestion, more misery.

So with this in mind, here’s my call to the city of Seattle, King County, the State of Washington — heck, to anyone out there planning to close some road to build some thing. If the first things to go when construction starts are bus lanes, sidewalks, and bike lanes, then misery is inevitable because the only rational recourse is to drive. It’s a it’s a vicious cycle: the worse congestion gets, the more rational it is to drive. If what we hold dear when road space is scarce is bus lanes, if we plan for access first on foot, then we can have… well, it would be an exaggeration to call it a virtuous cycle. But we can at least have a relief valve; the sort of relief valve that cities with grade-separated transit have.

When road closures are so bad that severe congestion is inevitable, we can do all these things:

  • Aggressively provide dedicated space for transit. Transit vehicles, fewer in number than general vehicles and driven by professionals, can merge much later before a bottleneck, if they can’t be given dedicated space through it.
  • Ensure that safe pedestrian and cycling routes (well lit, clear of debris, near legitimate activity when possible) are available through all stages of construction.
  • Get serious about publicity, especially about the pedestrian and transit elements, but also about alternate driving routes that keep people well clear of the area.
  • Maybe offer promotions like free transit rides on routes on the days with the most severe closures.

Some people will still choose to drive. That’s the nature of our city and our transportation system today. Even they will have much better outcomes during construction if everyone that can avoid driving avoids driving! It doesn’t have to be the zero-sum game of inevitable misery.

Al Dimond is an early-middle-aged computer programmer who works in Fremont, and who wants to take your car, cram you into an apodment, and force you to like atonal music.

56 Replies to “Transit in the Construction Zone”

  2. [ot]

    I guess we should take solace that she didn’t buy a ballot item to guarantee SOV access to all Aurora traffic lanes in perpetuity.

  4. Love it. Every construction bottleneck should be required to have an HOV/Bus lane. If there’s only one lane then either make the SOV’s drive around, or add a temporary metering light before the bottleneck.

    1. Or….
      (hand waving wildly in the air)
      as mitigation for the congestion being induced, a ‘BailyTram’ ™, very similiar to Mattmobiles, also ™, but can be constructed in days such as the BailyBridge for I-5. Of course, the tram rides would be free.

      2. Holy ‘TramCrap’ Mattman. That’s incredible.
        Are those the new vehicles being tested for Ballard Spur. That dump bed will hold tons of riders, and alighting along Market is a breeze with the new TiltBox ™ technology- Hang on folks.

    2. HOV 3+ lanes would be slightly more politically feasible, given that anybody could use them if they can find some friends to commute to work and/or go to an event with. Before 520 construction screwed up the HOV 3+ lanes, they rarely ever were congested, except for the points where they were forced to weave in SOVs trying to get to the SOV lanes.

      1. All the construction zones I’ve ever seen, the HOV lanes are the first to go. Even if the HOV lane isn’t actually where the construction is, it is always restriped to be a general purpose lane during the construction.

        And sidewalks…from what I’ve been seeing with Link construction, if even Sound Transit can’t see the importance of keeping sidewalks open, good luck convincing SDOT or WSDOT to do it. (In particular, I am talking about 43rd St. in the U-district, just east of Brooklyn, next to ST’s demolition of the former Chase Bank. Not only did they close the sidewalk on the north side of the street, what what would have been plenty of space to erect a temporary sidewalk on the roadway is instead taken by by barricades with “no parking” written on them. If they could just find a way to say “no parking” more efficiently, the space for a sidewalk is right there).

      3. I agree there are exceptions, but they are rare. I saw more exceptions during a recent trip to New York City. During several intersections while crews were repaving sidewalks, a temporary sidewalk was creating by barricading off a lane of traffic.

        Here, Sound Transit closes the sidewalk for a block in the U-district and in the road space that should have gone towards a temporary sidewalk, they fill it with “no parking” barricades instead.

      4. Rare indeed. Which is why B’ham and WWU should be commended. Imagine closing Montlake to cars to work on sports fields. Not seeing that happen any time soon.

      1. Like a pair of trebuchet and a couple of big boxes of styrofoam peanuts? Think of it as a gondola with off wire capability :=

      2. Giant rubber-tubing-based slingshot from downtown Kirkland to UW Station. Great view, slightly rough ride.

    4. If WSDOT can create temporary bus lanes for their road construction, why can’t SDOT create temporary bus lanes for their own road construction projects?

      1. If you’re referencing the temporary bus lanes on 520, it’s because WSDOT has a MASSIVE amount of right-of-way available there that can be managed with good construction phasing. Even then the bus/HOV lane seems to get shorter (and the bus stops further from the streets) every time there’s a weekend closure. SDOT doesn’t have that kind of luxury with city streets.

      2. There are as many lanes on most of Aurora Ave N as there are on SR 520. So, I don’t think that’s it.

      5. The 4-5 lanes of 520 right now are taking up only about half of the ROW for the project. Going under the new lids ALL of the lanes are squeezed onto just one half of the ROW. They’re narrow lanes with no shoulder, though. I don’t have ROW width numbers, but I’d bet that 520 construction zone is significantly wider than Aurora.

        See this, for example.

    5. Oh, and if WSDOT pays for extra mitigatory bus service during construction projects, why isn’t SDOT expected to do the same for its own projects?

      1. Probably because WSDOT is imposing its construction on a city, while SDOT is not imposing on another jurisdiction.

      2. SDOT is creating havoc on a state highway. Which brings up a stupid question: Why do local jurisdictions get to decide to have HOV or bus lanes on this state highway.

  5. The 40’s situation has seemingly gotten worse with every stage of the Mercer Project. First the “straight and right turn” lane became a shared left/straight/right lane, forcing buses to unnecessarily suffer Mercer box-jamming. And now southbound 9th seems to have shrunk to one lane entirely, for a variable length and unknown duration.

    This is unacceptable on what has become the primary trunk route for both Ballard (better, aside from Mercer, than fighting the cumulative backups the D experiences) and Fremont (more reliable, aside from Mercer, than the 26/28).

    In addition to restoring a straight lane through the duration of the construction — this would be a de facto bus lane, as hardly anyone else goes straight through this intersection — what 9th and Mercer frankly needs in the afternoon is a cop. Standing in the intersection, waving hands, overriding signals. A solution employed at busy or constuction-addled intersections in big cities all the time, but seemingly never here. At the very least, the cop could keep traffic on 9th moving just long enough so that the bus doesn’t barely miss (yet another) signal and have to wait (yet another) three minutes for no reason.

    Alternately, I wonder if the 40 should just return to the 8th->Aloha->Dexter detour that the 17 used for nearly a year during some other construction project.

    2. At rush hour, the cops are too busy holding up pedestrians so downtown drivers can emerge from their underground parking garages.

      1. Yep.

        Can’t say I’ve seen that particular bullshit “special assignment” in many well-functioning cities either.

  6. Well at least we have the temporary cycletrack/path on the north side of mercer under 99. I know it’s really just a construction zone, but it has proven wonderful for both eastbound and westbound trips by bike. (No need to creep behind walkers on the 4-foot-wide sidewalks for now).

    Sad to see those on the busses have to crawl through this mess:(

  7. Can buses take the exit at Dexter southbound off Aurora–do they fit under that underpass? Because that would be useful for dealing with this mess longer-term instead of sitting all the way to Valley stuck in traffic.

  8. In the past few months, Eastlake Avenue has been experiencing rush-hour backups, too. People clearly are diverting.

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