Weekend Express Lane Directions
From the blog queue – here’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write up for about two months. Today’s topic: Why in the world do they do that on the weekends?!
So, let’s take a step back and lay down a disclaimer: I don’t know anything about proper traffic management, I don’t have a degree in it, I haven’t ever done it for a living. The total sum of my traffic management experience is empirically noticing stuff around Seattle and blogging about it when time permits. 
Ok, that’s out of the way… so now I ask: Why in the world do they do that on the weekends?!
Do “what” on the weekends, you ask? Reverse the express lanes, I answer!
Yes, at least on I-90, and even on days when there is no obviously good reason to do it (ie – a game at Qwest or at Safeco), the express lanes are sometimes reversed during the day and are at other times letting traffic out of the city. Let’s talk about each of these in turn:
Reversing the lanes during a weekend day, even if there’s no crush of traffic to warrant it – This doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would you reverse the lanes on a regular weekend day? The whole point of the reversible express lanes is to release the pressure of crush traffic during crush traffic periods. Now, there’s a whole different argument about which direction the lanes should be facing, and I’ll get to that in a sec. But for now, let’s just make the claim that the lanes should point into the city when we want to get lots of people into the city, and should point out of the city when we want to get lots of people out of the city. Pretty straight forward.
So then, if there’s not a crush of traffic on the weekend (barring game days, etc), why would you ever reverse the lanes on the weekend? Good question.
Letting traffic out of the city on a weekend day – This is the obvious follow-on question to the first observation. If you’re not going to reverse the lanes when there’s no crush traffic, which direction should the express lanes face? Some cities simply close the express lanes in both direction on times when there’s not a need for their use.
But not Seattle. Seattle leaves them open pretty much all the time. That’s fine with me. What makes no sense and frustrates me (at least a little bit… enough to blog about it) is that we seem to generally leave the express lanes open and FACING OUTBOUND from the city on the weekends.
I can think of absolutely no reason to have the express lanes facing outbound (ie – away from the city) on the weekends. I propose that it makes a lot more sense to flip the express lanes to be facing inward (into the city) at some point late on Friday night or early Saturday morning — after the Friday out-bound rush — and leave them facing inbound all weekend, and right up through the Monday morning inbound rush. This would make it easier (albeit only the smallest bit) to get into the city than to get out… which seems like a noble goal for the city.
So, we’re just about done here, but there’s one more thing to talk about. Express lane directions overall.
Most cities seem to have a very predictable set of traffic patterns during their rush periods. Ever Seattle falls into this category. The problem is that most cities have a very singularly targeted crush INTO the city in the morning and OUT of the city (back to the suburbs) in the afternoon.
In Seattle, however (and remember, I don’t have the data here), the crush is fairly evenly spread into the city and out of the city in both morning and afternoon. Lots of folks who live in the suburbs, work in the city. But unlike many other cities I’ve had experience with, lots — and perhaps an equal number –– of people live in the city, but work out in the suburbs. Like me, living in Seattle and working in Redmond. And some not-so-small portion of the other 60,000+ people who go to MS campus each day. And lots of other businesses out on the eastside as well.
So, at least for the East<->West commute, I would argue there’s some merit to having the express lanes turned OUT of the city in the morning and back INTO the city at night. I have no numbers to say that this is a good idea, but it’d make my commute a bit easier at the very least.
So, to end that point, one thing that’s desperately missing BECAUSE we have these reversible express lanes is general HOV lanes going each direction. So, this means that if you’re coming into the city in the afternoon — even if you’re in a carpool — there’s no carpool lane to get you there faster (since the express lanes are pointing the other direction). This is something that’s set to change if-and-when the reversible express lanes are reclaimed for light-rail transit, and it’s something we’re desperately in need of ASAP.
