Big surprise is how little commute time grew in '90s

If you hate your commute, if you wonder where all those cars came from, if you long for the good old days when the Seattle area's traffic seemed more manageable, then what you're about to read may be hard to swallow:

The typical King County resident's trip to work increased by a measly two minutes between 1990 and 2000, just-released U.S. Census Bureau statistics indicate.

That's right. Two minutes.

"It doesn't seem very dramatic, does it?" says King County demographer Chandler Felt.

The average commute time was 24.2 minutes in 1990, 26.5 minutes a decade later.

That the overall increase is so small probably comes as a surprise to many in this traffic-obsessed region. It doesn't surprise experts such as Felt much at all.

It's true, they acknowledge, that many King County commuters are spending much more time on the road now than a few years ago. Leilani Bowdle, a nurse at a Renton women's clinic, gave up a five-minute commute for a 40-minute trip to work when she and her husband, Wayne, bought a house — their first — in Black Diamond three years ago.

Between them, they figure they drive close to 1,000 miles a week.

"If we hadn't done it, we wouldn't have a brand-new house," Bowdle says.

But researchers say that, while there are lots of people like Bowdle, there also are lots of people like Andy Zaytsev.

Tired of a commute that could take up to 45 minutes at night, the Microsoft software design engineer moved a few months ago from Bellevue to a Redmond apartment right across the street from the Microsoft campus.

Now he walks to work. It takes him all of 10 minutes.

"People tend to have a certain amount of time that they're willing to travel in order to get to work," says Larry Blain, principal planner with the Puget Sound Regional Council. "If it gets to be more than that, they make adjustments."

They move. They change jobs. They start riding the bus. They go to work at a different time.

"That's why those doomsday scenarios about gridlock never happen," says University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill.

Other transportation statistics from the 2000 census released this week reveal that:

• Drive-alone commuting, while still the choice of more than two-thirds of all King County workers, dropped modestly, from 71 percent in 1990 to 69 percent.

• More than three-quarters of all Snohomish County and Pierce County workers still drove alone to work in 2000. But while drive-alone commuting dropped in Snohomish County in the 1990s, it increased slightly in Pierce County.

• Slightly higher percentages of King County workers now car-pool (12 percent), ride public transit (10 percent) or work at home (4 percent) than a decade ago. The gains are small, but transportation researchers say they are significant because they mark a turnaround: the 1990 census showed big drops in car-pooling and transit use in the 1980s, while drive-alone commuting soared.

• A slightly higher percentage of King and Snohomish county households had no car or just one car in 2000 than in 1990 — probably a reflection of declining household size, demographers say.

• Average commute times in Snohomish and Pierce counties, farther from King County job centers, increased by more than four minutes between 1990 and 2000.

• But in Seattle, the region's biggest employment center, residents' average commute time also edged up, from 22 minutes in 1990 to 24.8 in 2000. That's a bigger increase than King County as a whole.

At the county level, the new census numbers paint a portrait of commuting in the Puget Sound area that has changed little from a decade ago.

Look closer, however, and the statistics tell stories of communities undergoing major transformations. Residents of fast-growing cities on Puget Sound's "exurban" fringe — once-small towns, now bedroom communities — experienced some of the biggest jumps in commute times during the 1990s.

The typical Arlington resident's commute increased 50 percent, to 27 minutes from 18 minutes. The typical Enumclaw resident's commute was 34 minutes in 2000, up from 26 minutes in 1990. Maple Valley, North Bend, Duvall, Monroe, Snohomish and Stanwood also saw big increases.

All those cities have less-costly housing, which helped fuel explosive population growth during the decade.

And all have relatively few jobs.

"People are moving out there and commuting very long distances," says Scott Rutherford, a University of Washington transportation researcher. As more of them move "out there," the back roads they take to work quickly grow congested.

Not too long ago, Black Diamond was a sleepy former mining town on the road to Mount Rainier, known mostly for its colorful history, its brick-oven bakery and the coal cars that mark the city limits. Those attractions are still there, but during the 1990s the city's population tripled to about 4,000.

The newcomers came for affordable housing, not for jobs. The typical Black Diamond resident took 38 minutes to get to work in 2000, seven minutes longer than a decade earlier.

Wayne and Leilani Bowdle moved to Black Diamond from Renton, where both still work, in 1999. They wanted to get out of apartments, buy a house and start a family.

They paid $145,000 for a detached town house in Diamond Village, a new 5-acre, 41-unit development. "To get a house even close to this in Renton would have been over $200,000," Wayne says.

That was out of their price range.

They pay another price now: grueling commutes. Leilani, 27, says she's learned all the back roads between Black Diamond and Renton — but everyone else seems to know them, too. If she can't leave work before 5:30 p.m., she says, she's learned to just stay at the clinic an extra hour until traffic starts to clear up.

Wayne, 28, who is about to get laid off from his night-shift job at Boeing's Renton plant, is taking classes at Bellevue Community College to become a teacher. It's a 50- to 55-minute drive to campus in the morning, he says, no matter how he gets there: up the Maple Valley Highway and congested Interstate 405, or out Highway 18 to Snoqualmie and back to Bellevue on Interstate 90.

"The commute — it stinks," says Leilani. "But not too many people get a brand-new house for $145,000."

Redmond is Black Diamond's opposite number: lots of jobs, some of the region's most expensive housing. It's also one of the few communities in the region where the typical commute time actually dropped in the 1990s, from 22.6 minutes to 20.7.

Kirkland also saw a decrease. Bellevue's average commute time increased just 0.2 minute, Bothell's 1.0, Mercer Island's 1.1 — all far below the county average.

Those numbers reflect the Eastside's emergence as a major employment center, demographers say. It accounted for 40 percent of the 237,000 new jobs the county added between 1992 and 2000. The 58,000 people who work in Redmond now outnumber the 45,000 who live there.

"More people who live on the Eastside are working on the Eastside," says Blain of the Puget Sound Regional Council.

"They want to have a shorter commute," says John Resha, executive director of a Redmond business organization that works to reduce drive-alone commuting, "and they're willing to pay some of the higher housing costs to have it."

The desire for a shorter commute played a big part in Andy Zaytsev's recent move to Redmond. He came to the Eastside — and the U.S. — from Russia a year ago as a Microsoft recruit. He and his wife and daughter rented an apartment in Bellevue, near Northeast Eighth Street and 140th Avenue Northeast.

For Zaystev, 25, who had traveled to work by train in Moscow, American commuting came as a shock. "If I went to work at 7 o'clock, it was 20 minutes," he says. "If I came home at 5 o'clock, it was 40, 45 minutes."

So he started looking for someplace closer. The Archstone Redmond Campus Apartments, across Northeast 40th Street from Microsoft, offered cheaper rent, he says, and a nice move-in package.

Not to mention the shorter commute. Now, Zaytsev says, he can walk to work, and his wife, who doesn't work outside the home, can have their only car during the day.

She's happy. He's happy. He can even come home for lunch.

Eric Pryne can be reached at 206- 464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com.