SEATTLE — When compared to pre-pandemic levels, less car traffic is returning to downtown Seattle than to the cores of most other large American cities, according to new data from the traffic analytics firm INRIX.
One major caveat: Because downtown Seattle does not include South Lake Union in INRIX’s analysis, Amazon’s return to in-person work is not captured in the data.
That said, Seattle is still 27% below its pre-pandemic inflow to downtown, a lower rate than just four other cities: Los Angeles; Sacramento, Calif.; Detroit; and San Francisco, which is down 41%.
Except for Phoenix and San Diego, every city still sees fewer people driving into their downtowns than in 2019. However, a handful of cities, including Denver; Tampa, Fla.; New York; Boston; and Atlanta, are creeping back to those same levels.
The driver data from the Kirkland-based company comes amid hopeful news about increased foot traffic and transit use downtown. Overall bus ridership remains below pre-pandemic levels, but lines that run into downtown and past South Lake Union, including the 8, the 62 and RapidRide lines, are seeing some of the fastest growth of all King County Metro routes.
Bike and scooter shares are also seeing record-high use.
Kirk Hovenkotter, executive director of Commute Seattle, said people are looking for new ways to get into Seattle’s retail and office core. His organization is seeing more demand from small businesses who want to get their workers onto transit.
“Our focus is, how do we make it easy to get into downtown?” he said.
Parsing the discrepancies between cities requires some nuance, but those with the slowest return of vehicles tend to have a heavy concentration of jobs downtown, often in the information, financial or professional fields. Tech-heavy Seattle and San Francisco meet these parameters, as does Detroit, which hosts General Motors as its primary employer downtown.
New York City also meets this benchmark but emerges as a conspicuous outlier in the data. While Seattle and San Francisco saw little increase over the last year, traffic into Manhattan jumped 13% in the same period. Unlike those cities, however, New York has enough diversity of activity and professions to draw people back.
Factors like income level, education level and access to broadband could also factor into overall trends, said Bob Pishue, analyst with INRIX.
For its analysis, INRIX draws from anonymized sensors, devices, cars and drivers from over 300 million sources, including commercial fleets, delivery vehicles, taxis and cameras, as well as consumer vehicle data.
Behind Washington, D.C., Seattle had the highest proportion of workers shift to remote work in 2020 and 2021, at 39%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Much of that is likely because of Amazon, which shuttered its office in the early months of the pandemic, emptying a whole neighborhood overnight.
After Amazon demanded its workers return to the office in May, parts of downtown and South Lake Union saw a bump in activity. In May and June, foot traffic was the highest it’s been in downtown in three years, at around half of pre-pandemic levels, according to the Downtown Seattle Association. Transit use increased, as did congestion on the bridges leading into Seattle.
The hope with Amazon’s return is it will trigger an upward spiral of employers bringing their workers back to the office. While the increased foot traffic data suggests a spillover effect from Amazon, the total effect is still unclear. Over the last two months, 50% of downtown workers have returned to the office, the highest since early 2020, but still trailing peer cities, said James Sido, spokesperson for the Downtown Seattle Association.
Meanwhile, nearly 3 million people visited Seattle in June, said Sido, outpacing the same month last year. Preliminary data suggests that Saturday — when Taylor Swift, the Toronto Blue Jays and Capitol Hill Block Party all converged in Seattle on the same day — saw the most visitors on a single day since even before 2019.
