Call me crazy, but I harbor warm feelings for a stretch of cold concrete and asphalt.
I love that left-hand exit from northbound I-5 onto Broadway in Everett: good old exit 192.
By next year, being a solo driver coming left off the freeway onto Broadway will be a memory. Pillars are in place for a Broadway exit on the right intended to ease the I-5 bottleneck in Everett.
I have decades of good left-exit memories. Granted, they won’t rise to the level of Everett stories to tell the grandkids someday. But I do have an odd affection for exit 192.
Since a job interview in 1978, I’ve been taking it routinely. With directions from The Herald’s news editor at the time, I drove my Volkswagen bug up from Seattle’s University District. I found the newspaper office with no trouble, heeding often-repeated instructions to “take the only exit to the left.” I got the job as a summer intern.
Every morning that summer, I made the reverse commute, Seattle to Everett. Always, I exited left onto Broadway. I knew no other way to get to work.
After moving to Everett in 1981, I did know other ways. I just didn’t take them. Returning from long road trips when our kids were small, we’d take the Broadway exit, drive through town, and they’d recognize they were home.
Still, whenever I come north from Seattle or south Snohomish County, I exit to the left, go north on Broadway and turn west onto Hewitt Avenue. Traffic lights, Everett Events Center tie-ups, I don’t care. I like seeing what’s up in the city I call home.
My house is far enough north in Everett that I ought to try other routes, but I’m a creature of habit. Make that a creature of the left lane.
Freeway exits aren’t supposed to be fun, but that one is. It has a little grand prix curve, if you know what I mean; and if you do, please don’t share it with my insurance company.
That exit is a no-brainer. Once you’re off the freeway, you don’t have to turn right away or stop or do anything but cruise on down Broadway.
Victoria Tobin also has an affinity for that left-hand exit. And she’s not just anybody. Tobin is a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation.
“I like it a lot, it kind of swoops,” said Tobin, who takes exit 192 on her way to her other job as a Navy reservist. “I think we like it when we get off the freeway, and there’s no sudden stop.”
Tobin’s aim isn’t to stir up nostalgia for the soon-to-be-gone route. While she understands my fondness for the familiar, Tobin said changes will prevent problems all of us see now.
Currently, drivers with no intention of exiting often stay in the far-left lane until just before the exit to beat the northbound freeway snarl. Then they suddenly move right, disrupting traffic flow.
“People try to jump over,” said Connie Lewis, the Transportation Department’s public outreach manager for the I-5 Everett expansion project. “People think they can get ahead of the traffic, and it gets a little scary.”
No question, Lewis is right. Safety and traffic flow trump any discomfort with change.
The new plan will still have a left-hand exit onto Broadway, but only for the carpool lane. That exit will open in 2007, Tobin said. The exit to the right will be finished by June.
We creatures of habit will still land at about the same spot on Broadway. We can still get coffee at the new Starbucks and check out the AquaSox crowd on summer nights.
“The whole configuration is going to get a little easier,” Lewis said. “At first it will be new, and people will have to not panic if they miss it.”
In the meantime, Lewis has a suggestion. I told her where I live, in Everett north of downtown. Lewis said when I-5 isn’t too backed up, I should try exit 195 onto E. Marine View Drive.
“Make this an experiment. Go and try this exit,” she told me.
Gee, I don’t know. I never go that way. Tobin understands. “People are comfortable with what they’ve been doing for years and years,” she said.
Lewis, who likes pioneering new ways home, said the change would save me gas and time.
“If you get lost, call me,” Lewis said. “I’ll come and rescue you.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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