Amazon has demanded that all of its employees return to the office full-time, five days a week. Now, as those workers head back to the office, officials in the company’s home base of Seattle are warning that the policy may clog up local traffic routes.
Local news outlet Fox 13 recently interviewed a public transportation official who said the policy would impact traffic flows. Amazon has some 50,000 workers in the city of Seattle alone, and all of those people have to commute. “There’s going to be more people on the road,” said Aisha Dayal, with the Washington State Department of Transportation. Dayal added that local drivers should give themselves extra time to get to work and encouraged them to use the state’s free traffic monitoring tools. “We have a lot of resources…on our website,” Dayal said, noting that the state has a free app that offers “real-time traffic information for people.”
Another local news site, K5, quotes Ryan Avery, deputy director for the Washington State Transportation Center at the University of Washington, as saying that he felt that Amazon’s policies would be “challenging for traffic.”
Fox 13 also cites a previously published study that claims Amazon’s return-to-office policies have spurred regional traffic slowdowns in the Seattle area. That report, produced by the analytics firm INRIX, claims that Amazon’s first Return to Office policy led to 35% slower traffic on some local routes. The report noted:
Seattle’s case is not unlike many cities and Central Business Districts around the globe. Employers looking to bring people back into the office will increase VMT, place strain on parking, and ultimately, reduce commuting travel speeds. As speeds slow down, drivers sit in traffic jams, losing time, money and fuel to congestion.
When reached for comment, Amazon noted that it provides a variety of commuter benefits and services to employees for office commutes. It also emphasized that its Seattle employees have already been required to come into the office three days a week, so the full-time RTO policy wouldn’t necessarily represent an unprecedented influx of commuters, it reasoned.
Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, announced the global return-to-office policy in a blog post in September. The demand that all of the company’s approximately 350,000 employees return to the office full-time has spurred intense backlash, including protests from workers who have gotten used to the flexible work-from-home policies that characterized the pandemic. Amazon recently made the decision to delay the rollout of this policy in a number of large cities because it didn’t have enough office space for returning workers.
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