Traffic across Seattle got worse as people returned to the office last year, according to data from transportation analytics firm Inrix.
Traffic congestion in the Seattle area increased 9% in 2024 compared to 2023. According to the 2024 Global Traffic Scorecard, drivers lost an average of 63 hours due to traffic delays, five hours more than the previous year.
According to Inrix, Seattle has the 10th worst traffic congestion in the country – the same ranking the city had in 2023. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Houston, Atlanta and Washington DC were the nine cities that ranked higher than Seattle in traffic congestion. Of the cities on the list, only three spent less time on the road compared to the year before: Los Angeles, Boston and Washington DC
A major factor in the increased road congestion is the return-to-the-office mandates for many local workers, especially Amazon workers.
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About 10% of Seattle’s employment is in the downtown area – comparable to only a few other metropolitan areas such as New York and San Francisco, according to Inrix. Other cities included in the study, such as Atlanta, have only 3% of downtown jobs.
Amazon, which employs about 50,000 workers at its Seattle headquarters, has led the movement to bring workers back to the office. In February 2023, Amazon asked all employees to come to the office for three mandatory days from May of that year. KIRO Newsradio traffic and transportation reporter Chris Sullivan immediately determined that the change was affecting traffic coming into Seattle.
“The return of Amazon workers to Seattle for three days a week has blown our commute out of the water,” Sullivan wrote in May 2023.
Further on, Sullivan obtained numbers from Inrix, a traffic-study company, reporting that average weekday speeds on western State Route 520 (SR 520) had dropped 28% since the Amazon’s return. The average speed on Interstate 90 (I-90) west decreased by 38%.
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For downtown speeds, cars average 20 miles per hour, the third-fastest speed among the ten most congested cities, after Los Angeles and Miami. Other cities, such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington DC, all have average speeds of less than 15 miles per hour in their downtown areas.
The Washington State Department of Transportation’s (WSDOT) three-year project to upgrade Interstate 5 (I-5), Revive I-5, is also expected to begin this spring, shutting down large portions of the highway so crews can work on the arterial road. Revive I-5 will cost an estimated $203 million.
“Travelers using I-5 should expect significant traffic impacts when the two-lane work zone begins in spring 2025,” WSDOT warned via GeekWire.
Frank Sumrall is content editor at MyNorthwest and producer of the Seattle Seahawks podcast, The reset with Gee Scott. You can read his stories here and you can email him here.
