After reading John Cook’s The worst cities for traffic jams: Where booming Seattle and San Francisco rank at GeekWire, I decided to chart my earlier estimates of Amazon’s employee headcount against INRIX’s Seattle traffic studies. The amount of time a Seattle resident spends annually in traffic roughly parallels Amazon’s employee growth that past five years.

Seattle Amazon Traffic

Seattle Traffic Congestion vs. Amazon Headcount

INRIX reports the average Seattle resident lost 63 hours in traffic last year. Cook says, “in the course of just four years, traffic congestion has nearly doubled in Seattle.” During this same time Amazon headcount has roughly tripled. Just wait for the 2015 data.

Posted by Jeff Reifman

Jeff is a technology consultant based in the Pacific Northwest.