I'm posting this for people who don't generally drive through King County on a weekday, so that you may hopefully be better prepared for the unusual courtesies that you may not be currently enjoying in the country. I've spent a few years commuting regularly from the ferry terminal to various parts of King County in a full size pick-up, and I hope that my experiences can help you through this refreshing exercise.

If you drive a car (highways):
1) Do your best to ensure that no one else enters the highway from an on-ramp. Should you find yourself in the far right lane, near an on ramp, be sure to adjust your speed in sync with the attempting merger (either speed up or slow down or both, usually both) and force them to the shoulder if possible. These roadways are crowded enough, and you should help with the congestion whenever you can. The desired result is to see the attempted merger hit the ditch, sacrifice your own vehicle if necessary, it's worth it in the long run.

2)Turn signals are a very serious distraction on the interstate freeways. Never, ever use them as it may distract another driver in another lane, thus causing a possible highway fatality. Should you witness someone else using their turn signals, your best method of defense is to either speed up or slow down, accordingly, and get the flasher of death just behind and out of your peripheral vision, and keep it there. This is accomplished by keeping the front half of your vehicle aligned with the rear portion of the offenders vehicle in the adjacent lane. These drivers are well known around the metropolitan areas and studies show they have a much higher rate of just shooting across lanes, without any warning, like a drunks first day out of jail.

3)Speed limits on highways range from 55 mph to the incredible 70mph in outlying rural areas. However, only YOU can prevent serious highway fatalities. Many people attempt to do the speed limit at various times during their commute. However, if you maintain a speed of no more than 50 mph, you will never find yourself in an accident that could do any real harm. 50 mph saves lives, and now that you've been enlightened with this, your first duty is to move your vehicle into lanes further left until you have ensured that everyone behind you can not drive at maniacal speeds of 51 mph or more. You are the gatekeeper, and you are duty bound to protect the more foolish citizens from driving at the MAXIMUM speed limit.

4)It's best to exit the highway from the second or third lane to the left. Again, no turn signals, as stated above. Should you be nearing your exit and find yourself in the far right lane, it is generally better to pass a few vehicles in the last half mile before your exit, then exit in front of somebody else at a rate of speed less than the vehicle back and to your right. Exit in front of pick-ups if you area able to or even a semi-tractor/trailer combo. Be sure to apply brakes and remind everyone behind you to slow down. At times, this may draw a blaring horn or a waving middle finger from the offender behind you. Don't be startled, however, this is just the urbanites way of saying "Good Job, Keep It Up!". In the past, this has even been credited for sudden moments of generosity as passing motorists sometimes try to give you their half empty Aquafina bottle or room temperature Starbuck's Mocha. It's challenging actually getting the drink in the neighbor's vehicle at 50 mph and sometimes they wind up hitting the windshield instead, but it's the thought that counts. If the offenders compliments seem extraordinarily abundant, do them the courtesy of re-entering the highway in front of them, no matter how far onto the off-ramp you may be, and give them another mile or two to witness your gracious driving ability. This will also give them the opportunity to read your cool new license plate trim without squinting, just another courtesy that is available on King County's endlessly hospitable roadways.

Cheers, I'm ready for a Martini.

Sorry for the rant,

#3: Sitting in the passing lane or HOV lane on an empty freeway doing 10 under.
WA is the only place in US where the rightlane moves faster than the left lane.

I drove all over the Western US last summer and EVERY time I encountered some Assh*le camped out in the fastlane with his cruise control on set at 10 under the MoFo had Washington plates.

I encountered this mainly on I-5 and I-90 North of Eugene and West of Missoula, but ran into it in I-40 in AZ and I-15 in CA as well as I-80 in Wyoming.

And yes, those same F*ckers have the "Self Appointed Traffic Cop" attitude of gunning it anytime you try to get around them.

I like the folks who create their own lanes of travels in parking lots, (driving diagonally across the set out lanes) making the experience of going to the store a death defying one. To make it better, they also travel at freeway speeds! If only I had that laser gun that vaporizes cars.

Among others, I've always "enjoyed" the one speed only driver - 45MPH on the freeway, in town, at the boat ramp, etc...........

Amazing how many dumfuks think the carpool lane is the passing lane!

Miss Fay can you see this

My personal fav is people driving in the HOV lane JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN.
There will be a mile of open road ahead of them and a mile of cars bumper to bumper behind them.

HOV lanes are not a solution to traffic problems. They are a temporary bandaid for 30 years of poor planning. Just my $.02

Did other states plan better for traffic conjestion then WA did?

In my opinion this state has sat on it's rump and done nothing, we do however spend a lot of time on over priced studies.

Apparently you subscribe to rule #3. Get the [censored] out of the fast lane then.

I love those people that get on the freeway at 3 am when no one else is around and get all the way over in the fast lane right infront of you.

We need to raise more taxes. According to the state of WA, we are as of this morning $187 mill short for our current transportation projects. Those gas tax increases in 03's weren't enough. People aren't driving enough taking mass transit instead. That way we can build more HOV lanes and offramps with cement leaves on them...it will fix everything. Maybe we can spend another 15 years and $107 mill a year thinking about removing the viaduct and making more light rail trains to seatac everyone uses to get to work.


/sarcasm

The idea behind HOV lanes is to get drivers/cars off of the road. So why are they full of soccer mom's or a single parent with a baby seat? Did I miss when they handed out drivers licenses to children?

That is one of my biggest gripes, how does a fetus in a car seat qualify as a freaking carpool!?!?!?!? My 17 year old dog that goes to work with me every day and guards my truck on the job site should fit the bill as well then!!

At this point it's beyond doubtful that we can spend or build our way out of gridlock. Get used to it. Telecommute if you can. Otherwise get used to spending 2 to 4 hours of each workday just getting to and from work. How can the Puget Sound society of 4 million people experiencing this kind of population growth expect to live in their suburban 3,500 sq ft homes, or 5 acre mini horse farms, 10, 20, or 40 miles from their place of work, all driving their single occupant SUV, and really believe they ought to be able to get there on uncongested roads? What kind of drugs are they on?

I'm still waiting for Sound Transit to "save the day." What a F'n joke.

I hate the FARKN freeways dumdass wipping in and out of traffic not letting you merge.rubber neckers to many idiots

I agree that traffic gridlock makes for a lousy way of life.

The solution? Reduce the human population back to 2.6 million. Traffic was tolerable, but still crowded on the morning Lynnwood to downtown commute, but otherwise not bad. How about everyone who wasn't a resident of WA in 1968 please move away? Incidentally, that was the human population when Wa consistently last had harvestable wild salmon and steelhead. So naturally I'm all in favor.

Well done!

Dude, if you were stuck in a car with a screaming kid in traffic you would start capping people out the window to get home faster.

Trust me my 2 year old almost sends me over the edge when I am stuck in traffic with him and he won't quit crying.

Giving soccer moms access to the carpool lane prevents road rage

I have a dream that one day they'll rip out the bridge on i-5 and 1-205 and make washintonians ride the tram to oregon. Does everybody drive 62 in the left lane in WA?

That's Rule #3.

It's not the congestion or the gridlock that bothers me so much. I have worked and commuted in many major cities, here and abroad. Congestion is a necessary evil. What really bugs me is the lack of courtesy and the passive/aggressive attitude that I seem to only find in Seattle and Minneapolis. Sorry again to air out my frustrations, tried to do it with at least a little bit of humor. I realize there is nothing in this world I could do about it. What would be nice in a perfect world would be if people allowed you to merge onto the highway, allowed you to change lanes when you've done the textbook mirror/signal/blindspot check and move right if your not passing anybody. Every single day one of the above happens to me, usually more than once. I used to think it was just oblivion that caused people to drive like that here. But after about the thousandth time that you've synced your vehicle, coming off the on ramp, to make the proper merge, only to watch somebody gun it and block you at 60 on the highway, trying to force you into the wall (just for the sake of not being one more car behind), you begin to realize that the innocent, polite persona that you see everywhere else here, leaves as soon as some people get behind the wheel. I didn't mean to piss anybody off, but I'm sure there are people here who can relate, laughs on me this time.

Cheers, I'm at the ferry, the nightmares almost over for this week.

Yep
As much as I hate LA, if your doing 70 in a 60 and cars are passing you on the right, you will get a ticket for impeding the flow of traffic (it is enforced there)

On I-15 down around Escondido, if your doing less than 105 in the left lane you're holding up traffic. If you want to do 70, you better stay in the right lane with the Semis and RV's or you'll get creamed.

Don't kid yourself. I have driven all over this country ( keeerist, I drove a 20' budget truck from Utah to D.C. and a year later from D.C. to this sun forsaken place) and other than the goofs outside of Yakima and Centralia, you Orebongians are a bunch of hall monitors or pace cars. 'Scuse me, but I'm passing you one way or another....Yes the shoulder will work to get away from your asses....In my rearview mirror....'

I love the huge 5 mph backup going in either direction, and 5 miles and 30 minutes later you realize it was an accident on the other side of the freeway, and everyone must have forgot to watch Cops the night before because they have to hit the brakes and stare. Or it could be the even bigger problem to stare at, a car with a flat tire on the shoulder.

Hankster,

You're actually making the most sense about the subject of commuting. Live near your work. The notion of living the idyllic country life and commuting without an extreme hassle into the city for its better paying jobs is the most unreasonable expectation and possibly the peak of idiocy. "Ya' can't have it both ways," shouldn't be hidden away in the fine print. The real difficulty I think is for the unskilled and semi-skilled workers who are needed desparately in the city, but cannot possibly afford to live there in anything that isn't sub-human accomodation.

The real need I think is for those commutes from the suburbs to become so heinous that commuters will seriously consider an adjustment to a more rational lifestyle. Hence I support smaller roads, not larger and better freeways, which just feed, rather than cure, the disease. I think Americans, with the love affair with the single occupant vehicle will only switch to alternative transportation when that alternative actually gets them where they're going significantly faster than driving. As long as white knuckle road rage driving will get them to the office 20 minutes or less later than mass transit, they will continue to prefer the dysfunctional SOV/freeway system.

Sg

I'll probably never be able to afford a home in Medina, Mercer Island or Queen Anne. I used to live in downtown (Belltown), what I could afford before I purchased. My secure parking garage was broken into on 5 different occasions, each time my truck was targeted. I know, I'm stupid for not handtrucking all of tools from the pickup up into the 700 sf condo I was living for 1300/month every night. I still had to commute to whatever neighborhood to perform a days work. My unskills pretty much dictate that I work in neighborhoods that have houses on the low end starting at seven digits, everyone in my family put together couldn't afford one of those homes. So I think I get it now, I was too poor to afford a good college education that made me rich by 30, had to get by with technical education out of a community college, so that places me at the peak of idiocy, and so I don't deserve to be here in your neighborhood anyway? Should have just applied for welfare right out of the gate and saved everyone the misery, instead of trying to better my and my families situation. Next life, when I'm born into poverty again, I'll just do my best to stay there and save you poor city folk the misery of someone that knows how to use a blinker. Point taken.



So what are people that drive for a living supposed to do??

Question of the day since Washingtonians consider light rail & mass transit a Commie Plot.

(Especially since almost none of them have ever had to use it.)

Trust me. If I could take a bus to the current job-site I am on and be on time I would do it. Frees up my hands to listen to good jams and catch up on some reading. The shame train never scared or shamed me. $4.oo a day to commute beats the price of gas and $15.oo a day to park.

Gee, I wonder why that is? A 11 billion dollar West Seattle to Ballard line...including engineering and trains being bought from the French!

Then they piss away 250 million down the drain with nothing to show but egg on their face!

I'd be nice if they turned the Burke-Gilman Trail back into a rail line that ran commuters around lake Washington. I'd pay for that.

I was up in Seattle yesterday getting onto 520 from Montlake and met the asshole who punched it and sped up 5 carlengths just to try and keep me from merging from the onramp. He sped up so much he had to slam on his breaks to narrowly avoid slamming into the car infront of him.

If I didnt have my family with me I would have followed him home & pistol-whipped him. Instead I just gave him a 1 finger salute.

That was you? My bad...

i would love to live near where i work, but the situation in thurston/pierce/king counties is such that it would seem that few can afford it without a 6-figure salary. those that work in seattle live around tacoma, guys that work in tacoma live in olympia, and those that work in olympia live in centralia or other outlying towns. i know that i've been effectively priced out of the market on anything close-in to town. i'd rather live in a small house close to the city than have a big yard and commute.

Fishpolelease,

I wasn't trying to make this personal and hope you don't think so. Sad fact is as human populations get really large, it's impossible, given the economic reality of supply and demand, for any but the affluent and those who can or will accept sub-standard accomodations to live in or near the city core. And it still applies that it's economically and physically impossible to have it both ways - living in the suburbs or rural areas and commuting quickly and efficiently. The experts willing to be honest about it say it's impossible to spend or build our way out of gridlock. So if you're among the middle class who can find your best employment opportunity downtown, I don't see any alternative forever into the future except long commutes that absolutely suck. They're bad now, and it's gonna' get worse.

Quite honestly, there have been jobs I'm interested in that are in the Seattle area. I don't even look at them because I'm not willing to commute from Oly and I'm not willing to pay that much for housing, assuming I even could.

Chum Man,

Without an alternate reality then, much of the middle and lower economic classes are doomed to miserable commutes. If there's a way out of gridlock, and I'm not sure that there is, it's gonna' take a ton of buses and possibly a sophisticated train system.

When I have to commute the I-5 corridor, I wonder why the heck there isn't a commuter train running up and down the median that links to east-west buses at the major interchanges. I hate sitting in stop and go as much as the next guy and took my present job knowing I don't have to depend on an I-5 commute. I'm just worried that the arterials I use could get as bad. Of course I can resort to my bicycle if car traffic gets too slow.

Sg

That's good news, I was worried all weekend that one of my favorite "posters" hated me for being the guy in the big white fleet vehicle, (my bad for the misinterpretation). Honestly, I know grid lock will never, ever relent. As population grows, so will the highways, and so will congestion.

Today will be extra fun on the roads. ;-)

Got the 1 finger wave this morning on 167 @ 4:30 a.m. . Dude is going 50 mph in the far left lane. Picked my spot got around him. Out came the friendly greeting. What happened to slow traffic KEEP RIGHT? Then jackweed came flyin by me right before 405 exchange. Go firgue. Must have been a BOEING engineer or a state road worker.

Make the driving test a bit harder so that people who actually pass the test KNOW how to drive. We're putting people on the roads who have NO business whatsoever behind a steering wheel. That's one way to reduce congestion.

Get people off the roads who are driving on suspended licenses. It may not be PC to say it but those folks can ride the bus. We do have an excellent bus system in the region.

Traffic congestion is now solved.

If you want to blend in with KingCo drivers, get a lobotomy.

Well said, but it needs to be built.
Ironic that it's your 520th post.

If I ran the show:

All on and off ramps would be on the right hand side of the freeway.
There would be no four lanes, down to three lanes, down to two lanes.
The Seattle powers were plenty willing to use immenent domain for the monorail now we'd see it used where needed.
Highway 99 would become an actual highway again. No cities or districts would be allowed to add stop lights.
Ferries would pay for themselves which may slow down rampant development across the pond.
I'd wait for the viaduc to fall down then, using emminent domain again, tear down all of the condos and replace it with a much larger viaduc.
Bulldozers would be stationed along the freeways and highways. Blocking a lane you get bulldozed off to the side. Tow them away after rush hour.
I'd discourage and maybe even penalize cities like Seattle and Bellevue who try very hard to concentrate all big business in one area creating commuting nightmares.
Finally, I'd launder, I mean fund, billions of dollars to select friends in order to perform a "feesability study" for development of a Star Trek type of teleporter to, once and for all, resolve traffic headaches, climate change and pollution. Coincidentally the study will be completed about the time I retire.

How about this?......Didn't Alaska stop selling land ?.....I know that the Growth Management Act screwed a lot of landowners out the possibility to develop, but maybe we need to crank up that concept? If people didn't have a place to live, they would have to leave, right? hmmmmmm

In fact, if the State bought out all the sellers, and refused to allow further construction, wouldn't that send some of those out-of-state imports elsewhere? (I'm kinda liking this... )

Less folks = less traffic, less cops, less government.....more fish for me......is there a down side?

Yup, "The State" is made up of you and me and a pile of others that would have to fork out the money to buyout all the sellers!

I have a simpler solution: licenses to have kids and limits!

Once you learn we don't have and never will have the money to spend our way out of gridlock, and you learn that logistically due to the large and increasing human population and the finite land base we cannot build our way out of gridlock, then what cha' got for a solution?

Aunty's the only one who's got a finger on the pulse of this problem.

Free public transportation--- starting in the neighborhoods with small buses or vans to the main streets with bigger buses on 15 minute intervals.

By the time I drive to a park and ride I can be at work.

In California I can take a bus and I do once a week to the job I am currently on. Easy convenient and green. So that is equal to 20% of the time... the other days I am at other locations and cannot bus it. But always carpool home, I love carpool lanes..... zipping by all that traffic. Same applies to Washington zip up the 5 hop on the ferry and stay on the island. works seamlessly

Hankster,

The weather is nice enough that most of the year in the Bay area a person could ride a bike to a BART station. When auto traffic on arterials becomes stop-and-go, bikes are faster. My youngest daughter is in grad school in Berkeley and works a few days a week in the city. Assuming that a car is a good way to get around is the first flawed assumption.

Sg

Berkeley to the city is a mass transit breeze, in fact anywhere BART goes is convenient for travelers. It is fast and if it takes you to the far reaches of the bay area. The one of the few places it does not go is into the north bay where I live, they do have bus bridges that could make that work if you were so inclined. In the 60's Bart was proposed to go into Marin county which is in the northbay, it was voted down because it would attract the " wrong" type of resident. Guess what I ended up there anyway. If there was something Washington state could consider it is a system similar to BART it is astronomically expensive I cant remember the per-foot price but it is shocking

OW,

Right, it is a breeze for those who are willing to not rely on a car to get to and from the BART stations. Yeah, it's funny how the middle and upper classes don't want to resign themselves to public transit. An observer has to assume they prefer gridlock, cuz that's the obvious consequence.

Hankster,

If you're handicapped I apologize in advance. It ain't about what we desire for transit. I desire a chaffeur driven Bentley to take me to and from work, but that ain't a happenin' thing either. I know a guy who works as a logger, and instead of riding in the jitney with the other loggers to the work site from the road parking area (typically 4-6 miles of logging road) he rides his moutain bike and then operates machinery and loads trucks all day, rides back to his car, and then joins us for a 30 mile road bike training ride twice a week in spring and summer. I'm saying the bike commute would more likely extend your life. Fortunately you moved into the city. Otherwise you could do as most commuters do, just b!tch about it, cuz traffic will get worse and not better.

Sg

Yeah they'd come to oregon and F up are traffic worse than you washingtonians!


I did a very scientific study in my recent travels on I-5 around oregon.. Every time the left lane was tied up by some 58 mph driving Jack ass (pissing me off was the scientific trigger for this study) I read the liscense plate. 90% of them were from washington, the rest were born during the great depression!

I moved 5 minutes away from my office and as much I dislike city life, I really enjoy the commute with no gridlock.

Hankster,

I wasn't picking on you. Just sharing what I've learned over the years after talking with traffic and highway engineers. I used to b!tch like so many and complain that if "they'd" just fix things, all would be good. It was quite the revelation to learn that "fix" ain't on the menu and won't be. So I figure it's up to each of us to find our own solution or semi-solution that works best for us. I'm less than 7 miles from my office. I drive now, but can also ride my bike if the traffic should become onerous. I'm building a new home in a semi-rural location that will either be an OK drive or I can also ride my bike. Alternatives are the imperative in my opinion; otherwise a person is stuck, and stuck ain't pretty.

Sg

It's like alcoholism with a plague of locusts. It needs to hit rock bottom and have the locusts move on to plague some other area before it gets better.

As far as the courtesy side of traffic goes, I would think that a lot could be improved with just enforcement and awareness of the existing laws (impeding traffic, merging, etc). When you get into the issue of gridlock, that delivers an entirely different logistical challenge of improving commute time with little or no ability to expand our current infrastructure. As much as I hate to sound like the Socialist EU traffic Nazi, I have to say that they were much smarter in developing, and continuing to develop new railways that span the entire continent, actually more if you count the other side of the Urals. Over there, you have a traffic light for pedestrians, one for bicycles and finally one for traffic in the inner city, with mass transit generally occurring below ground. People follow the traffic laws at the intersections and on the roadways, and unless you're willing to pay about 10/gallon for petrol, you take the train everywhere, because it goes everywhere. We as a nation will never be able to afford the labor to put this together here without going trillions again into debt. The last time we sent railway expansion across the nation, or labor was much cheaper (see immigrant/slave labor). There's also that pesky eminent domain issue (jk, I wouldn't want them taking my house for a railway either, unless they paid what I was asking, not what they were willing to give). That's not to say that they don't have commuter problems as well, it's faster to walk from Waterloo to Heathrow than it is to get a cab from Parliment to Westminster Abbey. But if they didn't have that infrastructure, it would be much, much worse. At the end of the day, there's nothing we can do about overcrowded commutes until we send you to a road crew when you sign up for selective service. So, it's moot. Doesn't mean that you couldn't express a little courtesy to the other minions out there trying to make an honest living. I'm gonna buy a yurt and apply for a ski patrol position, that'll fix everything.