The Thanksgiving travel rush proved to be very busy, and there are only a few short weeks until the next travel period.
At the rest area near Fife along Northbound I-5, traffic was building early Monday morning, which is typical for a Monday commute.
But it felt like there was a little extra traffic early when KIRO 7′s cameras were there.
David Snapper was driving north towards Seattle. “I didn’t go anywhere,” he admitted saying. The Thanksgiving weekend proved much like any other for him.
Thanksgiving travel was expected to break records and even though Snapper says he was home he knows many people were not. “I think there’s a lot of traveling on the road especially this morning, people are going back to work people are going places seeing family and friends.”
William Longnecker also made a stop at the rest area while making his early morning drive. “Travel has definitely bounced back!”
Longnecker says driving the last few days meant much more traffic than usual. AAA says at one point - the stretch from Seattle to Ellensburg saw the third-highest increase in estimated travel time -- up 119% during peak times, a stat that Longnecker believes is true. “So much heavier traffic than what we were having prior to the pandemic.”
The Port of Seattle found SEA passenger volume was down about 8% from the forecasted levels. But Wednesday thru Sunday was still higher than last year’s levels by 3.5% and 2.6% over 2019.
SEA’s end of year projections will come later this month, but the airport anticipates levels close to Thanksgiving. TSA also says Sunday saw a record 3.087 million people screened at airports nationwide.
Dana Warr is the spokesperson for the Washington State Ferries and says it proved to be busy this weekend for ferry passengers. “We didn’t hit the 300k mark that we thought we would we got pretty close at 289K last year we saw 272k that’s about a 6-percent increase.”
He says the passenger numbers for the holiday week were significant, and so were the sailings; he says out of 2800 sailings, WSF says only 20 were canceled.
The ferries anticipate hitting 19 million passengers by the end of the year -- when holiday travel will pick up again, whether it’s roads, planes, or boats.
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