Ed note: I’ve always marveled about how polite Seattle drivers are. Alas, times are changing and are likely to worsen as gridlock descends upon us. But we all need to listen to safety tips. Here’s the take from a recent article in Crosscut:
“With dozens of people, on average, moving to Seattle daily, newcomers and longtime residents alike are facing a constant cycle of culture shock on regional freeways and local city streets.
The hard lesson for everyone: People here drive, ahem, differently. Driving behaviors aren’t the same everywhere.
Transplants from Los Angeles, the East Coast or South Florida — where driving habits are more fast and aggressive — might find Seattle driving unnecessarily slow and tame.
“That’s Old Seattle. We, as a passive-aggressive place, are slow to anger,” notes Mark Hallenbeck, the director of the Washington State Transportation Center and a senior data fellow at the University of Washington. “In Seattle, we’re looking to give way and we wave people in. In New Jersey, you fight your way in — there’s an expectation there.”
“We’ve had this huge growth spurt with an awful lot of people who come from very different cultures,” he continued. “The problem is you bring a bunch of people from New Jersey and New York to Seattle, and they are quick on the horn and they’re loud and aggressive, and Seattleites are backing off and going: ‘This person is crazy.’ ”
Unfortunately for all of us, reaching a compromise on a “new Seattle” way of driving isn’t likely anytime soon, Hallenbeck says.
“My impression of Seattle is, we haven’t come to terms with what current traffic congestion means to us,” Hallenbeck said. “That is part of our problem. If everyone is doing the same thing, it works better than if different people are doing different things.”
What’s the ‘old Seattle’ way of driving?
The blare of a car horn isn’t often heard in metro traffic and can be jarring to the Seattle ear.
“We don’t honk unless you’ve been sitting at a green light for more than 20 seconds and even then, it’s a very light beep,” Hallenbeck says.
But as Kelly Just, AAA Washington’s traffic safety program manager, notes: “Sometimes a honk doesn’t mean a negative. Sometimes you’re actually trying to give someone a signal,” such as that you’re willing to let them into traffic or that their headlights aren’t on in the dark.
Meanwhile, the newly arrived are still learning their way around while also facing Seattle’s unpredictable mix of traffic conditions. Some patience is required. Hallenbeck says the only real fix to that is time, but it’s also a never-ending cycle as people continue to flood in.
“As we incorporate more people into the network, they don’t know when they want to be in the right lane, when they want to be in the left lane, when is it going to be easy going from right to left. Those people cause extra disruption as they become familiar with when and where [traffic] breaks down,” he says.
“The only thing that solves that is [for newcomers to] drive the road for the next three weeks. … But as you continually add new people, you never get over that hump — this is a problem in a growing community.”
