Officials are worried about traffic as Amazon’s 50k Seattle workers return to the office this week

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

Fox 13 local news recently interviewed a public transport official who said the policy would have an impact on traffic flows. Amazon has about 50,000 workers in the city of Seattle alone, and all of those people have to commute. “There will be more people on the road,” said Aisha Dayal, with the Washington State Department of Transportation. Dayal added that local drivers should allow 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, like saying that he thought Amazon’s policies would be “challenging for traffic.”

Fox 13 also cites a precedent published study which says Amazon’s back office policies have spurred regional traffic slowdowns in the Seattle area. That report, produced by analytics firm INRIX, states that Amazon’s first Return to Office policy has led to 35% slower traffic on some local routes. The report noted:

The case of Seattle is not different from many cities and Central Business Districts around the globe. Employers trying to send people back to the office will increase VMT, put pressure on parking, and ultimately reduce commuting speeds. As speeds slow, drivers find themselves stuck in traffic jams, wasting time, money and fuel in congestion.

When reached for comment, Amazon noted that it provides a variety of benefits and transportation services to employees for office transportation. He also emphasized that his Seattle employees are already required to come into the office three days a week, so the full-time RTO policy doesn’t necessarily represent an unprecedented influx of commuters, he reasoned.

The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, ​​announced the global policy of returning to the office 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 an intense reaction, including protests from workers who have become accustomed 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 did not have enough office space for returning workers.