Officials are concerned about traffic as Amazon’s 50,000 workers in Seattle return to their offices this week

Amazon has asked all of its employees to return to their offices full time, five days a week. Now, as those workers return to the office, officials at the company’s Seattle headquarters warn that the policy could clog local traffic routes.

Local news outlet Fox 13 He was recently interviewed A public transport official who said the policy would affect traffic flows. Amazon has about 50,000 workers in Seattle alone, and all of those people have to commute. “There will be more people on the road,” said Aisha Dayal of 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,” Dial said, noting that the state has a free app that provides “real-time traffic information to people.”

Another local news site, K5, quotes Ryan Avery, deputy director of the Washington State Transportation Center at the University of Washington, as saying: As he says so He felt Amazon’s policies would be “hard on traffic.”

Fox 13 also cites previously Published study Which claims Amazon’s back-to-office policies have slowed regional traffic in the Seattle area. This report, released by analytics firm INRIX, claims that Amazon’s back-to-the-office-first policy resulted in a 35% traffic slowdown on some local roads. The report noted:

Seattle’s case is no different from many cities and central business districts around the world. Employers looking to bring people back to the office will increase VMT, put pressure on parking and, ultimately, reduce commuter travel speeds. As speed slows down, drivers sit in traffic jams, losing time, money and fuel due to congestion.

When reached for comment, Amazon noted that it provides a variety of mobility benefits and services to employees during their office commute. She also stressed that her employees in Seattle are already required to come into the office three days a week, so a full-time RTO policy would not necessarily represent an unprecedented influx of commuters.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced a global return-to-office policy on… Blog post In September. The demand that all of the company’s roughly 350,000 employees return to their offices full-time sparked intense backlash. Including protests From workers accustomed to the flexible work-from-home policies that have characterized the pandemic. Amazon recently Make the decision To delay the rollout of this policy in a number of major cities because they did not have enough office space for returning workers.