C J Campbell writes:

Yeah, we wouldn't want the NTSB faulting the real culprit there, would
we? This area has been a chamber of horrors for a long time. Near
misses are very common there. The FAA has so balkanized the airspace
that air safety has been severely compromised, just as the AOPA
predicted when the current airspace arrangement was proposed decades
ago.

What you have is a bunch of airplanes traveling a narrow corridor
through a bunch of class D airspace areas while remaining under a low
class B ceiling. Sure, you could call up Tacoma Narrows, and McChord,
or SeaTac, or Boeing Field, or Fort Lewis, or Renton, and transit their
airspace, but doing so requires you to be constantly looking up the
proper radio frequency from a whole list of different ATC frequencies
and figuring out which one is appropriate to use for your location and
direction of flight, all the while trying to fly the airplane and see
and avoid other aircraft.

Some pilots have made little lists of all the frequencies needed in the
area, but these lists always seem to be missing one critical frequency
or another. So everyone drops down to 1000' and tries to navigate a
narrow corridor that runs through a maze of radio towers and along the
freeway, trying to get from one side of Seattle to the other without
talking to anybody.

It sounds like a mess, but why can't you just contact one frequency and
request flight following?

Or for that matter, why can't you just fly IFR?

Or just fly around the complex airspace to the extent possible.