There’s no getting around it.

More people are trying to bus, walk, drive and bike than Seattle’s streets can handle.

And for three more years, your ability to move through one of America’s most cramped downtowns will take a back seat to growth, while road, construction and utility crews block lanes, private towers sprout like chia and transit capacity lags.

This era from 2018 to 2021 is euphemistically called the “period of maximum constraint” by transportation planners.

Traffic Lab is a Seattle Times project that digs into the region’s thorny transportation issues, spotlights promising approaches to easing gridlock, and helps readers find the best ways to get around. It is funded with the help of community sponsors Alaska Airlines, CenturyLink, Kemper Development Co., PEMCO Mutual Insurance Company, Sabey Corp., Seattle Children’s hospital and Ste. Michelle Wine Estates. Seattle Times editors and reporters operate independently of our funders and maintain editorial control over Traffic Lab content. Learn more about Traffic Lab »

You could say the traffic scrum began unofficially New Year’s week at Pioneer Square, where crews started tearing open three blocks of First Avenue South to relocate utilities for a future streetcar line.

About 60 tower cranes are aloft citywide, and in the central neighborhoods as many as 110 more buildings are proposed in the near future, often closing lanes and sidewalks.

Just within a block of Denny Way, some 14 towers of 40 stories or higher are planned or underway. The city has approved garage space to park 12,000 more cars in South Lake Union.

The Washington State Convention Center’s expansion will block a couple of road lanes during construction. Closing the Convention Place bus station will push hundreds of buses a day out of the transit tunnel and onto city streets. Demolition of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and the opening of a tolled Highway 99 tunnel to replace it, will force yet more traffic into those same streets.

The fallout from these billions of dollars in projects will affect commuters, shoppers, tourists and businesses — anyone who lives, works or visits in the central city.

Relief in the form of Sound Transit’s light rail tunnel to Northgate and a huge order of railcars won’t arrive until 2021 to carry growing numbers of people unable to cross downtown by bus or car.

More bike lanes, more buses that feed rail stations, and wider sidewalks are coming. Car capacity, however, won’t improve. Curbside parking will be swept away.

So the burden falls on citizens to adapt — to transfer between buses and trains, to drive less, to walk through a maze of contractor barricades — until the dust settles.

Mayor Jenny Durkan said during her campaign that congestion will get worse before it gets better, and pleaded, “It won’t be the mayor’s fault.”

Transportation officials have created the slogan “One Center City” that suggests a unified plan to keep you moving. It might just as well be a plea to cooperate, like people rowing a lifeboat in the same direction.

The government website onecentercity.org contains street-use proposals, maps and charts about Seattle’s growth challenge.

Here are the projects, detours and chokepoints, with cost figures when available.