State Route 7 (SR 7) is a

state highway A state highway, state road, or state route (and the equivalent provincial highway, provincial road, or provincial route) is usually a road that is either ''numbered'' or ''maintained'' by a sub-national state or province. A road numbered by a ...

Lewis Lewis may refer to: Names * Lewis (given name), including a list of people with the given name * Lewis (surname), including a list of people with the surname Music * Lewis (musician), Canadian singer * "Lewis (Mistreated)", a song by Radiohead ...

and Pierce counties, located in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sove ...

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

. The long roadway begins at U.S. Route 12 (US 12) in

Morton Morton may refer to: People * Morton (surname) * Morton (given name) Fictional * Morton Koopa, Jr., a character and boss in ''Super Mario Bros. 3'' * A character in the ''Charlie and Lola'' franchise * A character in the 2008 film '' Horton H ...

and continues north to intersect several other state highways to Tacoma, where it ends at an interchange with Interstate 5 (I-5) and I-705. The road has several names, such as Second Street in Morton, the Mountain Highway in rural areas, Pacific Avenue in Spanaway, Parkland and Tacoma and 38th Street in Tacoma. Near the end of the highway there is a short freeway that has been proposed to be extended south parallel to an already existing railroad, owned by

Tacoma Rail Tacoma Rail is a publicly owned Class III shortline railroad. It is owned by the city of Tacoma, Washington and operated as a public utility. It is one of three operating divisions of the municipally-owned Tacoma Public Utilities service, but u ...

, which serves as the

median In statistics and probability theory, the median is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as "the middle" value. The basic f ...

of the short freeway. The earliest road to use the current route of SR 7 first appeared in a 1900 map of the Tacoma area and has been part of the state highway system since 1909, when the Alder-Kosmos Road was added to the system as State Road 18. State Road 18 became part of two branches of State Road 5 in 1923 and later branches of Primary State Highway 5. During the 1964 highway renumbering, the branches became SR 7.

Route description

SR 7 begins at an intersection with U.S. Route 12 (US 12), a major east–west highway, in

. Traveling north as Second Street and paralleling the Morton– Tacoma (Mountain Division) route of

, the street intersects Main Avenue, which continues west out of the city as SR 508. After leaving Morton, the highway becomes the Mountain Highway and passes through a heavily forested canyon near

Mount Rainier Mount Rainier (), indigenously known as Tahoma, Tacoma, Tacobet, or təqʷubəʔ, is a large active stratovolcano in the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest, located in Mount Rainier National Park about south-southeast of Seattle. With a ...

and parallel to the

Tilton River The Tilton River is a tributary of the Cowlitz River, in the U.S. state of Washington. Named for territorial surveyor James Tilton, it flows for about , entirely within Lewis County. Course The Tilton River originates in the Cascade Range just ...

and Roundrop Creek. Bridging the

Nisqually River The Nisqually River is a river in west central Washington in the United States, approximately long. It drains part of the Cascade Range southeast of Tacoma, including the southern slope of Mount Rainier, and empties into the southern end of Pu ...

, the highway leaves Lewis County and enters Pierce County. In

Elbe The Elbe (; cs, Labe ; nds, Ilv or ''Elv''; Upper and dsb, Łobjo) is one of the major rivers of Central Europe. It rises in the Giant Mountains of the northern Czech Republic before traversing much of Bohemia (western half of the Czech Re ...

, the roadway intersects SR 706, which goes east to

Mount Rainier National Park Mount Rainier National Park is an American national park located in southeast Pierce County and northeast Lewis County in Washington state. The park was established on March 2, 1899, as the fourth national park in the United States, preservin ...

. Following the Nisqually River, which has become *

Alder Lake Alder Lake is Intel's codename for the 12th generation of Intel Core processors based on a hybrid architecture utilizing Golden Cove performance cores and Gracemont efficient cores. It is fabricated using Intel's Intel 7 process, previousl ...

, and Tacoma Rail line, SR 161 branches off towards

Eatonville Eatonville may refer to: * Eatonville, Florida, United States * Eatonville, Minnesota, United States, an alternative name for the former Dakota village Ḣeyate Otuŋwe * Eatonville, Mississippi, United States * Eatonville, Ontario, a neighbourhood ...

and SR 702 travels west from the plains to McKenna. Passing Elk Plain and suburban areas, the highway enters Spanaway near the Fort Lewis boundary where SR 7 intersects SR 507, which continues southwest to Chehalis. The Mountain Highway becomes Pacific Avenue and enters Parkland. Shortly after 112th Street, the roadway has a

partial cloverleaf interchange A partial cloverleaf interchange or parclo is a modification of a cloverleaf interchange. The design has been well received, and has since become one of the most popular freeway-to- arterial interchange designs in North America. It has also be ...

with SR 512, which uses 108th Street South as two ramps. Leaving Parkland and entering Tacoma, Pacific Avenue turns east as 38th Street and then has another partial cloverleaf interchange with a short freeway and the proposed route of SR 7, which is used by the roadway. The freeway was the busiest segment of the highway in 2007, with an estimated daily average of 27,000 motorists. The

of the freeway is the Tacoma Rail route and at the northern terminus is an interchange with Interstate 5 (I-5). SR 7 ends at the interchange, located near the Tacoma Dome, but the roadway continues north into Downtown Tacoma as I-705.

History

A 1900 map of the Tacoma area showed a roadway extending north from Spanaway to Tacoma that would later become SR 7. In 1909, the Alder-Kosmos Road, numbered State Road 18, was added to the state highway system and ran from Kosmos north through

and

Alder Alders are trees comprising the genus ''Alnus'' in the birch family Betulaceae. The genus comprises about 35 species of monoecious trees and shrubs, a few reaching a large size, distributed throughout the north temperate zone with a few sp ...

. The National Park Highway was created in 1913 and extended from the Pacific Ocean to Tacoma and south to Elbe, where it turned east into

. Both highways were replaced by two branches of State Road 5 in 1923, which traveled from Tacoma to

and Elbe to Chehalis. State Road 5 became Primary State Highway 5 (PSH 5) during the creation of the Primary state highways in 1937 and the Tacoma–Mount Rainier branch remained the same, but the Elbe–Chehalis branch was shortened to Kosmos. The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad started to parallel the route by 1951 between Tacoma and Morton. During the 1964 highway renumbering the two branches of PSH 5 became SR 7. Between 1968 and 2008, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad transferred the railroad parallel to the highway to

. The urban sections of SR 7 were planned to be replaced by the new Mountain Freeway, following the Tacoma Rail corridor between Roy and Tacoma. The northernmost section, between North 38th Street and I-5, opened on February 14, 1968. The remainder of the freeway was never built. In 2002, a new

auxiliary route In road transportation in the United States, a special route is a road in a numbered highway system that diverts a specific segment of related traffic away from another road. They are featured in many highway systems; most are found in the In ...

of SR 7, SR 704 was established to provide a bypass of Tacoma to provide direct connections between I-5 and Spanaway. On July 30, 2008, the

Washington State Department of Transportation The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT or WashDOT, both ) is a governmental agency that constructs, maintains, and regulates the use of transportation infrastructure in the U.S. state of Washington. Established in 1905, it is ...

(WSDOT) had a

groundbreaking Groundbreaking, also known as cutting, sod-cutting, turning the first sod, or a sod-turning ceremony, is a traditional ceremony in many cultures that celebrates the first day of construction for a building or other project. Such ceremonies are ...

ceremony to start construction of SR 704, which has been predicted to be finished after 2017. The segment of the highway between SR 507 in Spanaway to SR 512 in Parkland had a very high accident rate, prompting the addition of safety improvements to the roadway in 2007. Between Morton and Spanaway, WSDOT is currently (as of 2009) developing a route development plan to improve the roadway. The project is divided into three phases, the first phase was completed in 2006 and focused between Morton and Elbe and the second phase will be focused between Elbe and SR 702 while the third will focus between SR 702 to Spanaway. A small plane made an

emergency landing An emergency landing is a premature landing made by an aircraft in response to an emergency involving an imminent or ongoing threat to the safety and operation of the aircraft, or involving a sudden need for a passenger or crew on board to term ...

on a section of SR 7 in Parkland on August 1, 2019, following a fuel system malfunction. The incident was captured on the dashcam of a

state trooper State police, provincial police or regional police are a type of sub-national territorial police force found in nations organized as federations, typically in North America, South Asia, and Oceania. These forces typically have jurisdicti ...

Major intersections

References

External links

Highways of Washington State
{{DEFAULTSORT:Washington State Route 007

007 The ''James Bond'' series focuses on a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short-story collections. Since Fleming's death in 1964, eight other authors have ...

Transportation in Lewis County, Washington Transportation in Pierce County, Washington