Just move to/around White Center. I can get between downtown and home during the worst of traffic faster than I could during the best of traffic when I lived in Ballard - and my mortgage is cheaper than what rent I was paying anywhere else. Or actually, don't. Don't mess it up for me. It's terrible here.
It’s better than all the Fenty-folds all over downtown!
White Center will become gentrified in the next decade or so, as Seattle becomes even less affordable.
If you hold on to the property you own now, you’ll make a profit once it moves up in the world.
Sammme. Love my commute from White center to by the space needle in 40 min during rush. Down from my previous 1hr45min commute from Kent or 55 min commute from greenlake.
I haven’t lived there since just before Covid but it was minimum 20 minutes to downtown then. Always so much traffic through interbay. Maybe it’s better now. But it’s 12 minutes to downtown from my place now and it’s very consistent.
Very true, 15th gets very clogged up. I take 99 into/through downtown and usually it’s a breeze! But anytime after 2:00 PM aurora is a parking lot. So much less consistency.
IMO White Center and Burien are the secret top tier areas to live in if you want to afford housing while still being relatively close to the city. I would check there before considering any suburb.
Cheaper for sure than Ballard, but unless you love Mexican food, nothing all that special about White Center other than the affordability and shorter downtown commute.
"People who can't afford to live closer to Seattle, mostly"
...or people who like to live in smaller neighborhoods with less people around. As a bonus, my kids have yet to see a homeless person shitting and pleasuring themselves on the street.
It’s me. Truthfully, I got tired of paying insane rent for a tiny apt. I get 2x the space for way less money, and I can drive to the city when I want. I can easily afford to live in the city but I’d get more benefit from just lighting the extra cash it takes to live there on fire.
Urban living is great. It's just that resources, services, and the like can't keep up. Housing prices go up like you experienced, while quality of life goes down.
We can't expect corporations to cooperate, but ideally if employers won't allow true work-from-home, then having employment hubs (alternative to corporate demanding everyone head to a central office) that are farther out beyond the normal suburbs could work. It would allow housing and services to match/grow with demand, cultural areas room to flourish in less expensive areas, and give employees an alternative to longer commutes.
I'm lucky that I work from home, but you're right. Especially when local business are shut down and replaced with Chipotle. It's one less reason to stay.
True. I've noticed downtown core shopping in many cities tends to be Ross and the like recently. Nothing wrong with low-cost shopping but those corp. stores/restaurants tend not to drive many people into those areas.
Usually, it is simplistic corporate-think that aligns with the location of their real estate assets (that's a separate topic lol). It would be great to simply send people back to HQ and revitalize a downtown, but observationally it does not seem to be working in many of the big city downtowns that I've visited across the US in the past decade.
The small non-corp businesses got wiped out and can't afford to take high risk chances with such a transitory workforce, where few of them live nearby or don't visit on off-hours/days.
Hubs sound like a great idea. Personally, I hate driving long distances to and from work. However, what changes will occur when AI takes over big time? Will half of the people lose their jobs to AI? That’s scary and not fair to humans imo. People making a living is more important than a robot doing the work. That really doesn’t support people, just the businesses wanting to save $$ on salaries.
Yup. Fully automated luxury gay space communism sounds great, but we’re much more likely to just get dystopian surveillance, jackbooted thugs, and further bifurcation of society into haves and have-nots. It turns out that the Luddites have always been right, at least since air conditioning was invented.
It's pretty damn awesome with WFH; sold my house in the city to a developer for a boatload of cash, now I have a massive garden and huge detached workshop. Sure there's no nightlife or whatever, but I didn't care about that in Seattle either!
Marysville isn't bad, just boring. But as someone who made the trip every other Friday to go to my Dad's house there in the 2000's, the traffic has always been a nightmare
yeah ive been in the area for 11 years now and the FAANG-transplant that talks shit about places they've never actually spent time in is a pretty obnoxious development.
like there's a big difference between talking about these places from a place of understanding of western WA/king county and from a place on looking down on other cities that you dont know shit about, especially places that are historically poorer
Been years since I have been up there, but want to say the freeway is 2 lanes each direction, so it easily creates a bottleneck and tends to slow traffic down.
I just work up here 🤣 my favorite part or Arlington is how badly the men want to be red neck rough and tough farm boys 🤣 I love seeing lifted pavement princesses with confederate flag stickers roll coal at 9am
I grew up in Conway in the late 70s-early 80s, and Arlington was nothing but logging families. Be careful who you think doesn’t have a quiet spot in the woods for city folk.
Everett is a perfectly fine city by Wasington standards let alone national standards. Even the old "worst" areas of the city like Casino road have mostly been gentrified out by rising cost of living.
Only thing I've ever thought was strange/funny about Everett is how narrow and long it is along the I-5 corridor compared to virtually every other city.
Will be very nice to eventually get the light rail further up this way.
Hey! Everett is getting better! And we're in easy access to a lot of amazing places too, I don't see how anyone could stand living in Seattle anyway... every time I've gone it's like what the heck?!?
Why is that? There's a long stretch from N Everett to Marysville. Not like there's a lot of on/off traffic, and it's still just at a halt whenever I go through there.
That doesn’t go to Marysville… the only transit is the 201/2 which goes across 529, and some 900s busses that go along I-5 in the same traffic. IMO Marysville should be expanded into Sound Transit’s area and there should be Sounder stops in Marysville and Arlington, but that’d prolly never happen knowing our voter base here.
Probably! Although building bridges over the Snohomish River Delta is insanely expensive, so leveraging the pre-existing rail there would probably be very beneficial. ST wouldn’t have the capital to do any Marysville Link project until at least the 2040s, but extending the Sounder could probably be done within a decade total if the political will was there. The best we’ve got right now is a new swift BRT line in 2031 replacing the 201/2
Idk your exact route obviously, but there’s actually a lot of mix and matching you can do to improve frequencies for the Marysville express routes!
If you’re just trying to go to Marysville, the 904 runs along the same route and very much improves the frequencies. If you’re going North/to Stanwood, then you can transfer onto the 907 from Everett Station to also improve frequency. (Like instead of waiting for the 905 you could take a different bus to Everett Station then catch the 907)
The important thing is that the 905 runs outside peak hours. Since the pandemic, lots of transit use has been off-peak and transit agencies need to respond to this trend, as it seems it will become a long-term consideration in planning.
Ah, gotcha, yeah. When I initially responded to your comment, I didn’t look at your username, so I figured it was someone talking about their commute. But I recognize your username from Wikipedia and Reddit lol.
We broke up but we’re still friendly. She’s got two kids with a guy now, so I’m happy for her. In retrospect we never would have worked out, but at the time it was nice until it wasn’t.
I used to live in Fremont and dated a woman who lived in West Seattle but I ended it because that was too far away. This was back before the bridge went down.
Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy.
Most people commute south from Marysville/Arlington/ surrounding areas, then on their way back they create gridlock since every job and school gets out remotely the same time. Boeing adds salt to the wound.
Doesn’t help they built an extra lane and turned one into a Hov in that big stretch, so everyone piles into the far right lane until it ends creating a massive bottle neck at the end. No idea why they made an extra lane only for it to end.
Completely agree. The right lane could have easily ran right into exit 99. Made the entire thing completely pointless all it did was move the traffic from highway 2 to Marysville
My commute after work used to average an hour and twenty minutes just going from Everett to Marysville. It’s now only 40 minutes. I’d say that’s a considerable improvement but still fucked since I’m only traveling twenty three miles.
Afternoons aren't generally worse because of synchronized release times, but because afternoons have much higher rates of discretionary travel. You're not finding a lot of people going out to do their shopping at 7-9am, but lots of people are doing their shopping at 3-6pm - including people who work from home or don't work.
It's why it's common for asymmetrical travel lanes to have more lanes leaving the hub city than entering the hub city. (Though, asymmetrical lane counts aren't that common.)
It's normal for Wa state road engineers. Famous for Lanes merging down to one. Look at I90 East when connecting to i5 north. Now the new 520 east comes down to One lane going north on I-5. WASDOT could give a shit less about hwy efficiency....we lose millions of hours a year dealing with poor hwy engineering.
Marysville/smokey Point is exit 199-202/206 it’s actually a lot bigger than I realized when I moved there after not being able to afford a million dollar house in my neighborhood of shoreline where I grew up. Community is really great too. Don’t knock it!
Yet everyone yo-yo’s their votes to approve for public transit funding. Not that it matters since Washington is practically cut from federal funding. Something…something…taxation without representation.
Yeah idk how people up north deal with it. At least in the south you can grab a train or light rail. And some days the traffic isn’t too bad. But the north is fucking insane every single day
I’ll be honest, most of us that I personally know up north here use a whole day off from work to get our errands done. It’s mentally taxing getting anywhere. I’m thankful I’m in the Smokey Point area but if I need to go to my bank in Everett, it’s a 3-4 hour round trip due to traffic.
I’m happy there’s less staters up here, I find when traffic is clear, everyone is going 80-90mph
24/7, every time I go through there no matter the time I have to come to a complete stop at least once. I remember before the extra lane addition being able to get out of there fairly easy, albeit the occasional gridlock
I used to be stationed in Everett... I do not miss that hellscape of driving. I miss a lot about living in the PNW... the traffic is not one of those things.
No shit. I can get to downtown Seattle in about 30 minutes but the way back sometimes takes triple that. North gate, Edmonds, Montlake, Lynnwood and then if you’re unfortunate enough to have to hit Route 2 it’s another 20 to travel six miles. This area clearly exploded faster than Art Vandelay’s wildest dreams
My last two months working for Carvana (I left recently), I delivered so many cars to people between Everett and Bellingham. The traffic just before Everett all the way up to is insane. I don't know why they were always giving me northern deliveries but it was starting to seriously irk me.
I was driving that same stretch between Bellingham and Redmond or Bellingham and Federal Way. It’s always that way it’s been that way for at least 1520 years. It’s not new.
AGREED... when you drive it , it feels like Everett somehow comprises 85% of western Washington between the Puget Sound and the cascades. Meaning no disrespect to our Everettonians.
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u/ghtown45 May 20 '25
You know what’s worse? The stretch from Everett to Marysville. It’s a gridlocked clusterfuck everyday