Observations in Traffic Patterns After an I5 Bridge Lift
Interstate 5 or I5 is an Interstate Highway that runs parallel to the Pacific Ocean and extends all the way from Mexico to Canada. In the Portland-Metro area it’s home to some of the worst traffic snarls and the subject of much debate from commuters, environmentalists and everyone in between.
I myself, am a commuter, meaning that I live in Vancouver, Washington but I work in Portland, Oregon. Unlike some of my commuter brethren, I don’t hold a grudge against people that are anti-commuting; I see their point as equally as I see my own. I firmly believe that a solution won’t present itself until both sides drop the tribal/faction mentality, stop stereotyping and start work collaboratively towards a vibrant and workable metropolitan area.
Until that time, I5 is what it is – a traffic quagmire. Having resigned myself to this realization, I started trying to understand why I5 traffic is this way. Like any good geek, I started this process by collecting data. In a forthcoming article, I’ll describe in detail how I’m collecting the data, but for now I’ll just give a summary. Every 15 minutes, between the hours of 5 AM and 9 PM, an automated script will fetch a speed map of the Portland-Metro area from WSDOT (Washington State Department of Transportation).
Although I’m still early in the process of collecting the data, I found something interesting on July 21st. Although I have no hard data to support this (I wasn’t there and I only have the empirical evidence of the speed maps), I’m fairly certain that an I5 bridge lift occurred in the late morning.
Before we get to the data, I should note, I’m not a traffic engineer, I don’t hold a degree in Civil Engineering, I don’t work for a government agency and the images below are copyrighted by WSDOT. I’m just a web developer with a thirst for knowledge and an intense curiosity for how and why traffic systems work and don’t work.
Let’s look at the data, shall we?
