Daily Score Blog

August 8/24 update: Seattle Times' blog on "the Clog" hasn't been updated for a few days--another sign that it's been relatively smooth sailing on I-5, thanks to Seattle-area commuters' willingness to adapt. (See also our post from last week.)

It's been on every Seattle resident's lips for weeks:  the horrible, terrifying prospect of losing two lanes of I-5, just south of downtown, for 19 consecutive days of major maintenance.  The predictions were as uniform as they were dire:  Gridlock!  Pandemonium!!  Traffic Armageddon!!!! 

I'm barely exaggerating.  Both major papers featured the lane closure in front page, above-the-fold articles.  It was a top story in local TV news.  And every single one of the stories carried the same storyline -- reducing traffic capacity was bound to be a nightmare for commuters.  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer dubbed it "19 days of pain."  The Olympian warned of a "worst-case scenario [with] idling traffic from Seattle to Tacoma."  The Ballard News Tribune declared that the closure would "dramatically affect traffic and divert thousands of vehicles onto city streets."  The Seattle Times even set up a separate blog -- dubbed The Clog -- to track the impending quagmire.

But as anyone who actually drove on that stretch of road would tell you, the predictions weren't just overblown.  They were the exact opposite of what actually happened.  Peak commuting-time traffic wasn't just lighter than expected, it was lighter than at any time in recent memory. 

It was, in the words of one post on The [so-called] Clog, "Maybe the best commute ever."

And I think that this non-event -- a big dog that never barked -- can teach us all a lesson about traffic.

I LOVE this idea:  a single off-switch for your whole house, to power down all of those non-essential appliances that suck electricity while you're at work or out on the town. 

OK, so it's just a concept at this point.  But it's a good one.  I know that my family could make good use of this.  Yeah, sure, we try to be pretty careful about turning off lights, but every so often we leave a light burning in the basement.  And of course, there's always a handful of appliances -- a stereo, a modem -- that suck a bit of power whenever they're plugged in, even when they're off.  (In many homes, the clock on the microwave uses more power than the oven itself.)  But plugging and unplugging all these appliances from the wall is a royal pain, especially since we have kid-safe protectors on all of the outlets.  A universal power-off switch would be a real boon.

Obviously, retrofitting my entire house to take advantage of this sort of switch would probably cost more than the energy I'd save.  But at a minimum, the idea of a whole-house off switch is a good reminder that there's plenty of waste left in the energy system -- suggesting that, in theory at least,  we could cut way back on our power consumption without affecting our lifestyles one whit.