I wish I were making this up. The Washington State Department of Transportation continues to insist that traffic volumes on the SR-520 bridge across lake Washington are going up up up—even though actual traffic volumes have been flat or declining for more than a decade!

In a charitable mood, you could forgive the 1996 projections. Back then, rapid traffic growth on SR-520 was a recent memory: up through about 1988, traffic growth was both steady and rapid.

By 2011, however, it should have been perfectly obvious that the old predictions were proving inaccurate. Yet WSDOT just kept doubling down on their mistakes.