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A flammable butane tanker truck rolled over on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing a midday shutdown of I-5 and Interstate 90 in downtown Seattle. Three people suffered minor injuries.

A flammable butane tanker truck rolled over on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing a midday shutdown of I-5 and Interstate 90 in downtown Seattle. Three people suffered minor injuries.

A flammable butane tanker truck rolled over on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing a midday shutdown of I-5 and Interstate 90 in downtown Seattle. Three people suffered minor injuries.

A flammable butane tanker truck rolled over on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing a midday shutdown of I-5 and Interstate 90 in downtown Seattle. Three people suffered minor injuries.

A flammable butane tanker truck rolled over on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing a midday shutdown of I-5 and Interstate 90 in downtown Seattle. Three people suffered minor injuries.

A flammable butane tanker truck rolled over on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing a midday shutdown of I-5 and Interstate 90 in downtown Seattle. Three people suffered minor injuries.

Seattle Fire Department crews respond to a butane truck rollover on Interstate 5 in downtown Seattle Monday morning. The incident blocked all lanes of traffic on I-5 and Interstate 90.

Seattle Fire Department crews respond to a butane truck rollover on Interstate 5 in downtown Seattle Monday morning. The incident blocked all lanes of traffic on I-5 and Interstate 90.

A butane tanker rollover caused a crash on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing freeway closures in both directions of I-5 and I-90 in downtown Seattle.

A butane tanker rollover caused a crash on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing freeway closures in both directions of I-5 and I-90 in downtown Seattle.

A flammable butane tanker truck rolled over on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing a midday shutdown of I-5 and Interstate 90 in downtown Seattle. Three people suffered minor injuries.

A flammable butane tanker truck rolled over on Interstate 5 Monday morning, causing a midday shutdown of I-5 and Interstate 90 in downtown Seattle. Three people suffered minor injuries.

Monday’s commute was real mess.

If you managed to get downtown to work (as I did), then you got to face the fact that getting out of downtown was going to be a neat trick as traffic diverted from Interstate 5 and worsened by crazy thunder snow clogged up city streets.

But the total shutdown of I-5 through downtown Seattle for roughly eight hours was a good chance to learn just how much we all depend on it (even if we don’t commute on I-5). It was also a chance for me to figure out how to get home to West Seattle when driving and even taking an easy bus are off the table.

The experience opened my eyes to some shortcomings in our transportation system (not that I wasn’t already aware of some) and also reminded me that a mix of options is clutch in such a jam as Monday’s.

Around 3:30 p.m. Monday, snow and graupel (a kind of small hail or snow pellet) began falling in downtown Seattle.

My trip home — to Arbor Heights, at the south end of West Seattle — started when I was finishing up a story at about 6:13 p.m. and realized that the last sailing of the King County Water Taxi to West Seattle left at 6:45 p.m. I was sitting in my Belltown office at that point.

I had never taken the water taxi before, but I knew from covering it that boats could and did often fill up, so I leapt from my chair and nearly ran down to Pier 50 to get the last boat across.

Traffic on Second Avenue was barely moving as far north as Denny Way, a good sign that driving home would be a nightmare and catching a bus would be dicey at best.

I made the ferry and got to an open seat a minute or two before the boat departed the dock.

At that point, I felt good for making the boat, but had put little thought into how I would connect to go the 5 ½ miles to home from the Seacrest ferry dock on the other side.

Before I arrived on the other side, a colleague had pinged me asking for some help on a project and my thoughts of how to get home left my head.

When the boat docked at the other side (a 10-minute or so crossing), I rushed into Marination and took a seat while I fired up my laptop and got back to work.

What I didn’t realize until today, however, is that in doing so, I missed the only bus that made any sense for me to get home — the last number 773 for Alaska Junction, which departed at 7 p.m. (though was certainly not in sight when I disembarked the ferry around that same time).

After I finished working, I turned on Google Maps and asked it how to get home on a bus. Then I became fairly disappointed.

For starters, having missed the last 773 (I didn’t know that yet), the closest next bus was up the hill on California Avenue Southwest. Google said I should hike up Ferry Avenue Southwest and then take the 55 to Alaska Junction and then hop on the 128 to finish getting home. The trip, Google noted, would take 51 minutes.

I walked the three-quarters of a mile up the hill and decided I didn’t want to wait for a bus, so I opened my ReachNow and car2go apps and found a car about a block away. Aside from some minor whining on my part about the location of the wiper controls in the particular car I drove, the rest of the journey took about 10 minutes and required no further walking.

All told, I had walked or ran about two miles, ridden a boat and rented a car to get home. I left my office at 6:15 p.m. and got home at 8:20 p.m., but with a 35-minute stop to work it made for about a 90-minute commute, give or take. In a car or on the RapidRide C line from downtown, it usually takes about 45 minutes during rush hour.

This isn’t a long way of complaining about my commute. Even if it took a while, I didn’t have to sit in my car with the engine running, going nowhere on the Alaskan Way viaduct for an hour.

But this is a long way of pointing out two things that are worth thinking about: The fact that even with a growing public transit system (150 million rides last year, according to recent figures), you can still find yourself with limited options during what some might call a traffic crisis.

And the fact that shutting down one of the major arterials through Seattle can drag the region to a near standstill and force people to get pretty creative to find their way out of it.

I’m sure plenty of you had similarly long and probably more frustrating commutes Monday. Share your experience in the comments or on the Seattlepi.com Facebook page. We may compile them for a story if we get enough responses. 

Daniel DeMay covers Seattle culture, business and transportation for seattlepi.com. He can be reached at 206-448-8362 or danieldemay@seattlepi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Daniel_DeMay. 

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