05/26/2026
I-90 OVERFLOW TRAFFIC **Why It Happens, Why the Easy Fixes Aren’t Easy, and What We’re Doing About It**
Anyone who lives in Upper County knows the problem.
The video shared here was taken on Nelson Siding Road on Monday afternoon by local resident Bret Balog. It shows what many residents saw and experienced during the Memorial Day return traffic: long lines of stopped or barely moving vehicles on local roads that were never designed to carry freeway-level traffic. His frustration is familiar to many Upper County residents, and the questions he raises—why this happens, why it keeps happening, and why someone can’t just stop it—are the same questions we hear after every major I-90 overflow event.
When I-90 slows to a crawl during heavy travel weekends, drivers looking for a way around the freeway back-up pour onto local roads through Upper Peoh Point, South Cle Elum, Cle Elum, Westside Road, Nelson Siding Road, and other routes that parallel I-90 between about milepost 91 and milepost 74.
For residents, the result is deeply frustrating: roads that are normally quiet and useful for daily life become long lines of stop-and-go—or just stopped—traffic. People trying to get home, get to work, respond to an emergency, run errands, or simply move around their own community can feel trapped by traffic that did not start here and is not trying to stay here.
We understand why people ask the obvious questions:
- Why not close the freeway offramps?
- Why not make the roads “local traffic only”?
- Why not force navigation apps like Waze, Apple Maps, or Google Maps to stop sending drivers onto county roads?
Those are fair questions. The Sheriff’s Office, county partners, state partners, and local leaders have worked on those ideas for years.
The hard truth is that Kittitas County does not have general authority to restrict public roads to local traffic whenever I-90 backs up. Roads can lawfully be closed or restricted in certain, specific emergencies, but heavy freeway overflow traffic does not meet that standard by itself. Even if a “local traffic only” rule were posted, there would be no legal or practical way to enforce it across miles of public roads and thousands of vehicles.
Navigation apps have also been approached at the local, county, and state levels. So far, those companies have not provided a workable way to prevent their systems from routing freeway traffic onto local roads during these events.
None of this makes the problem acceptable. It only means the most realistic tools available to us right now are visibility, enforcement, education, and traffic-safety work during the worst overflow periods.
That is what deputies focused on during peak westbound Memorial Day traffic.
On Monday, eight deputies were assigned to high-visibility traffic enforcement and safety work in the affected areas. They made 271 traffic stops and issued 76 tickets.
Upper Peoh Point, one of the main overflow corridors, normally sees about 300 vehicles in a day. On Monday, 2,555 vehicles traveled that road. Other bypass routes were also heavily affected. In South Cle Elum, which sits at the intersection of several overflow routes, east-west streets were locked up at times with bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Some residents understandably asked why deputies weren't standing in intersections directing traffic. The answer is that traffic direction only works when there's somewhere useful to send vehicles. During Monday’s peak congestion, there was simply nowhere to tell vehicles to go. I-90 was jammed, the bypass routes were jammed, and pushing vehicles from one blocked route into another would not have solved the problem.
The good news is that despite thousands of vehicles using town and county roads not designed for that volume, no crashes were reported in the affected areas Monday.
That matters. When these overflow events happen, our immediate priority has to be keeping people safe: residents, visitors, deputies, pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers caught in traffic.
We know this remains a serious quality-of-life issue for Upper County residents. We also know the answer many people want—a simple way to keep freeway traffic on the freeway—isn't currently available given existing law, road design, and navigation technology.
The long-term solution likely belongs mostly to state transportation planning, engineering, and construction. We hope that work moves efficiently.
In the meantime, the Sheriff’s Office will keep working with our local and state partners, keep using the tools we do have, and keep listening to our community about what has been tried, what has not worked, and what ideas may still be worth pursuing.
*Thank you to Mr. Balog for permission to share this video.
