If you think back to the 1950s, one of the motivations behind building the interstate highway system was to create a road network that would bypass downtown bottlenecks for drivers simply "passing through."
Consider the relative ease of driving from Seattle to Tacoma along Interstate 5 compared to Highway 99, which is the de facto "Main Street" for Tukwila, SeaTac, Des Moines, Federal Way and Fife. I-5 allowed the commuter to bypass the gauntlet of surface streets, turns and stoplights in these communities.
But what happens when your highway never gets finished? What if it dead-ends in a cornfield at the edge of town?
The answer, as residents of Puyallup and Fife know well, is that drivers flood your surface streets with congestion as they simply try to navigate through town.
Listen as Shelly Schlumpf, president and CEO of the Puyallup Sumner Chamber of Commerce, describes what happens every day in her community because of the state's failure to complete State Route 167.
