It’s one thing for a city like Vancouver, without freeways into its core, a high use of transit, higher densities and a special enthusiasm for greener ways of getting around, to see a drop in vehicle traffic – but quite another for Seattle, split by I-5, with low residential densities and a struggling transit system.
And yet, there it is:
Clark Williams-Derry reports in Sightline Daily:
Every year, the Seattle Department of Transportation tracks traffic at 19 select bridges across the city, and presents the resulting traffic count as a rough-and-ready gauge of citywide traffic trends. And based on these counts, SDOT believes that traffic across the city fell by a whopping 10 percent between 2003 and 2012.
But it gets more dramatic. The US Census Bureau says that Seattle’s population grew by 11 percent over the same period—suggesting a drop in per capita vehicle travel of more than 20 percent in a single decade.
And yet Seattle is spending billions on a tunnel to substitute for the Alaskan Way Viaduct and we’re going to spend billions on a Massey Bridge.
A certain madness we call Motordom.
