What the heck is he thinking

Lickety Split and other fast moves..

Chas Redmond notes some interesting behavior while navigating from West Seattle over to the U-District.

The trick - scoping out primary routes and then using alternate routes quickly when the primary shows signs of clog. What continues to perplex me is that pretty much everyone knows the alternate routes but insists or is compelled for some reason to stick with the primary route. It’s like the 45th and 50th Street I-5 interchanges in the U-District. Sure, 45th Street is the main drag, but that street and interchange are pretty much always jammed. 50th is a short four blocks away, is a through street and its interchange is NEVER jammed. I can’t believe the other seven-hundred-thousand Seattleites don’t know this and yet they insist on using 45th. The same holds for using I-5 or SR99. They both go pretty much the identical route from south to north and are separated by less than a mile over most of their parallel distance north of SODO. And yet, again, everyone insists on using I-5 and completely ignoring Aurora/SR99. That was true back in DC as well. There were literally a half-dozen ways to get anywhere on the District and Maryland side of the river and yet everyone insisted on using the Beltway. To get to the Virginia side there are a limited number of bridges but the one no one seemed ever to use was Chain Bridge just north of Georgetown. Using that bridge I could get to Falls Church or Vienna and back in less than an hour almost any time of the day, even morning and evening rush hours. I did have to know and use different methods of getting to the bridge because some of the roads leading to and from Chain Bridge become one-way during morning or evening rush hour, but still, with that knowledge I could save fifty-percent of the time it might take to get to Virginia. I’m equally positive the other Washingtonians knew this as well and yet, like the Seattleites, they insisted on staying with the one freeway which went “exactly” where they were going.

So the question I’ve got is “what causes this?” Is it the lack of thinking power? Do car drivers just want to do the same thing over and over again even if it takes forever because it’s easy and they don’t have to think about their route? Is it laziness? Is sitting in a stop-and-go situation on a freeway better than actually having to drive and navigate? Is it actual ignorance? Does everyone actually NOT know of any other way to get somewhere and they’re stuck using the one way they do know? Is it some expression of collective, urban sociology? Do folks actually like sitting adjacent to dozens of other car-bound humans listening to their individual radios or car music systems, staring out at each other staring back? Do people really have such a surplus of time that they feel compelled to spend it in this manner lest it wouldn’t get spent?

I really don’t know. Maybe it’s curiosity. I’ll research a map, talk to other people and experiment at non-busy times of the day to find alternate paths to places I need to get to that are otherwise difficult because of traffic congestion. In a sense it’s somewhat like a map-math problem. It’s a puzzle and a mystery and I would think that the combination would drive other people to experiment as well. Maybe I’ve got an advantage. I use the bus, I use my bike, and I walk a lot of the places where everyone else seems to use a car. I learn about alternate streets, different shortcuts, better paths, by using alternate transportation systems, and then when I am in a car I have advantage of this additional knowledge. So, the Aesop Fable lesson from this is that “those who are stuck inside their cars are forever bound to be stuck.”

I’ve noticed this trend a lot. Now getting over to the east side and West Seattle are a different matter since there are only four ways to get to the east side and really only two ways to get to West Seattle, but why does everyone take 45th to get onto I-5 when they could go five blocks over to 50th? Why does everyone use the Mercer Mess to get onto I-5? Why do people even TRY to drive down Pike street in the market on a weekend? Why is the Northgate way exit always backed up, yet taking Sand Point way north and around is never backed up? Why do the drivers ALWAYS enter University Village at the first driveway after the 45th ramp? Why not go the extra block and enter over by the parking garage or on 25th? They all back up trying to get into U-village on the weekends, which then backs up the 45th ave ramp, which then backs up 45th and eventually the I-5 exit onto 45th starts getting backed up.

I feel like a WA state drivers license test should include an “alternate route” portion if the person lives in Seattle. “Plan out at least two alternate routes to get to downtown.”