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These are questions your Seattle neighbors ask KUOW

caption: Crows and recycling are two common topics listeners ask KUOW about.
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Crows and recycling are two common topics listeners ask KUOW about.
Courtesy of Kris Tsujikawa

Birds, traffic, Puget Sound. Roads, earthquakes, Orcas.

For five years, you have been asking us questions, and we have taken those questions and reported them out.

Now we are turning the tables on these questions to answer our own question: Who is asking what around Puget Sound? We analyzed more than 2,000 questions to figure this out.

This is what you wanted to know about most (refresh your page if the graphic below doesn't show up):

Category Number of Questions
Roads 148
Natural disasters 138
Local history 138
Local peculiarities 104
News of the day 100


We still want to hear your questions! What do you want us to report on? Let us know at the bottom of this post.

Most of the questions came from Seattle, neighborhoods north of the Ship Canal.


Road signs and rabbits were on the minds of residents of 98115, which includes northeast Seattle neighborhoods such as Wedgwood, Maple Leaf, View Ridge, and Ravenna.

We got 95 questions from this ZIP code, the most from any one place. The questions were often about things you’d see on the roads, backyard animals and orcas ... and recycling and compost.

Animals are a popular topic of curiosity. This corner of the city seemed particularly keen on crows and mosquitos.

The second highest number of questions (82) came from the ZIP code next door, 98103, which includes Licton Springs, Green Lake, Wallingford, and Fremont.

98103 residents wanted to know how public money is collected and spent (like marijuana and income taxes), how laws are being enforced, and a category we call “local peculiarities.”

In this unscientific analysis, we created this category to cover the strange things you run across everyday: pink bathroom mold, for example, or Seattle’s unique features, such as houseboats and drawbridge tenders.

This crowd wanted to know about these kinds of questions a lot; we received more than 100 questions in this category.

By far, the biggest theme of all questions was getting around, be it by car, train, bus, bike or foot. You asked about roads 148 times, transit 92 times and driving 46 times.

And we answered:

Has I-5 in Tacoma never NOT been under construction?

Why doesn’t Seattle have more stop signs?

Does weaving through traffic get you there faster?

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions, are also top-of-mind, with 138 questions. These numbers are skewed slightly because KUOW hosted two disaster-themed trivia nights last year where we solicited listener questions related to such emergencies.

KUOW first started soliciting listener questions in 2014 under a program called Local Wonder. Last year, we changed the name to SoundQs and dedicated two reporters to stories on subjects of your curiosity.

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