Traffic Concurrency Adjustment a Boon to Suburban Seattle Builders
A significant barrier to housing development was removed last week when the King County (Washington) Council approved a change in the way traffic congestion is measured. Until the vote, the county’s “traffic concurrency” rule, which attempts to use traffic volume to determine where new growth can occur, made new building impossible in some unincorporated parts of the county.

Tim Attebery, a government affairs manager for the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties, said the rule change could open the floodgates to new home development across the county. “This has the potential to get 3,600 units of housing over the concurrency hurdle,” he said.

He said the previous methodology “arbitrarily took pieces of property off the table for development.” The old rule allowed minor bottlenecks to stop development in large parts of the county, even when traffic was moving smoothly overall. The new rule reduces the importance of those short bottlenecks.

The MBA of King and Snohomish Counties led the charge for the methodology change by brokering legislation to force the county’s department of transportation to reevaluate the rule. The department was required to provide officials with a list of infrastructure improvements that would open areas for development, those recommendations were used by the association and transportation officials to craft the new methodology.

The MBA of King and Snohomish Counties received a State & Local Government Affairs Recognition Award for their work on the project and was honored at an awards breakfast last month.

For more information on the association’s growth victory, contact Tim Attebery at 800-522-2209. [ return to top ]