Exactly How Many People Use The Viaduct Every Day?
Whenever we see one of those rubber county tubes in the street we're tempted to drive around the block like seventy times just so we drive over it again and again. We want our voice counted. Many, many times apparently. We want to send the message to someone, "Hey, there's people driving here and the flashing yellow at the end of this street is not cutting it."
Erica Barnett has a story about these same county tubes over at the Stranger right now that you should check out. It seems everyone has been using the number "110,000" to represent the amount of vehicle trips per day that currently involve the Viaduct and would need to be accounted for in any replacement scenario. "The viaduct's 110,000-vehicle-a-day traffic load," says the P-I, "about 110,000 vehicles a day," says the Seattle Times, "(110,000 vehicles) use the viaduct every day," says the WSDOT website. That number could be complete bullshit, though.
A look at WSDOT’s actual traffic counts, as measured by a computerized sensor on the roadway itself, however, shows “annual average daily traffic” of only 74,700 vehicles—just 68 percent of WSDOT’s inflated number. In general, actual traffic counts are far more reliable than computerized models in estimating traffic flow.
"Computerized sensor on the roadway itself" is fancy talk for "rubber county tubes," by the way.
Image courtesy of RS Photographs.
