While construction zones can be noisy and messy, most drivers recognize that the end result, an easier commute, will make the hassle worthwhile.
That’s certainly the case for the SR 520 widening project in Redmond, between West Lake Sammamish Parkway and SR 202.

Rainier Avenue through the heart of Renton is a work in progress.
It’s the city’s transportation workhorse, handling about 50,000 vehicle trips a day. That rivals the traffic load of such major commercial thoroughfares as Aurora Avenue in north Seattle.

Rodney Watkins fights heavy traffic every weekday driving between his home on Kent’s East Hill and his job in South Seattle.
When Watkins leaves home as early as 5 a.m., he can cover the 21-mile drive to his job as a garbage hauler at Cleanscapes in about 30 minutes. But when he tries to return home at about 4 p.m. or so, the drive can take twice as long.

While commuters may lose time and their cool while sitting in traffic, for manufacturers and freight haulers, time spent stuck in traffic has a direct effect on the bottom line.
The Green River Valley manufacturing district, running from Renton to Sumner, accounts for more than 80,000 jobs in the region and helps make the Puget Sound area the second-largest freight and wholesale distribution center on the West Coast, behind only the Los Angeles-Long Beach area.
And at the center of it all is the city of Kent.

Kent is a thriving city of neighborhoods, retail and warehouses – and nowhere is that growth more apparent than a weekday rush hour.
Lines of commuters crawl along with caravans of freight trucks, while trains close down crossings across the city on two sets of tracks.

Steve Cotton, operations manager for KGM Motorcycle Transport in Kent, has the same complaints as most drivers in the Kent Valley: traffic and trains.
But for Cotton and his business, which does the storage, transportation and final assembly for all of the motorcycle dealers in Washington, time is money.

Drivers who head east, west north or south through Kent all run into the same problem – heavy traffic.
There is no quick way to drive through the city because of thick traffic, especially at morning and evening rush hours.
Kent city officials know drivers struggle to go north or south through the valley as well as between the valley and the East Hill and West Hill.

While in healthier economic times, service providers and transit officials could be looking at expanding ridership, upgrading facilities, and adopting new technology, right now King County Metro is just trying to maintain the services they have.
Falling sales tax revenue has left Metro trying to find $213 million worth of cuts in the next two years, and an estimated $500 million over the next four.

Security upgrades and added police presence are the backbone of an effort to increase public safety at the Federal Way Transit Center.
The transit center, 31621 23rd Ave. S., is owned by Sound Transit, but patrolled by hired guards and local police. The city of Federal Way, police and Sound Transit are working in collaboration to install cameras with higher resolution as well as a direct video feed from the transportation facility to the police station.

“The significance is huge,” said University of Washington, Bothell Chancellor Kenyon Chan.
On Sept. 18, WSDOT and the UW-Bothell were scheduled to hold a ribbon cutting for the new Interstate 405/State Route 522 ramp leading to the joint campus of the university and Cascadia Community College. The ramp was to open to traffic a week later.