Memorial Day traffic grew during day
Washington state is certainly living up to AAA’s billing as the top road-trip destination in the country this holiday weekend.
The traffic took a little longer to build up than it used to before the pandemic, but by mid-afternoon, volumes were high, just like the state Department of Transportation predicted.
The number of vehicles has been increasing throughout the day. North Bend is where traffic usually begins to thin out and even here, there is a lot of traffic passing through now.
It didn’t take long at this popular stop in North Bend to find someone who had just braved the traffic on I-90, headed westbound.
“It was rough,” said Frank Wellman, Roy.
The roughest part? “Probably right out of Cle Elum,” he said. “Yeah, right off the exit. We came from the Leavenworth exit.”
It was a common refrain.
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“Traffic wasn’t bad coming from Moses Lake until you got into Ellensburg,” said Brennon Ames, Covington. “But then it started getting backed up. But then it kind of opened up until you got outside of Cle Elum. And then it was just backed up from Cle Elum just to the wildlife overcrossing. That’s when it finally cleared up.”
This video from that part of I-90 gives a sample of what drivers faced.
This guide for drivers that the state Department of Transportation put out was a bit off from pre-pandemic Memorial Days. Traffic was lighter than usual between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. this afternoon.
“There’s a number of variables that could have played into the travel times,” said DOT spokeswoman Meagan Lott.
She says the high cost of gasoline might have kept some people off the highway. Or drivers might just have waited a while to get on the road. Because by mid-afternoon, traffic was building in the expected choke points.
“In the Cle Elum area, we have on and off ramps,” Lott said. “And so, there’s traffic that is, are going from two lanes to three lanes, and then back down to two lanes.”
She says drivers could be stuck in the back-up anywhere from one to four hours.
But I-90 isn’t the only freeway with big back-ups on this Memorial Day. There were traffic back-ups on I-5 north of Lacey and U.S. 2 too.
