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 Morton and Elbe to Alder. 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 Mount Rainier National Park. Both highways were replaced by two branches of State Road 5 in 1923, which traveled from Tacoma to Mount Rainier 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 Tacoma Rail. In 2002, a new auxiliary route of SR 7, SR 704 was established to provide a bypass of Tacoma to provide direct connections between Interstate 5 (I-5), Fort Lewis, McChord Air Force Base and SR 7 in Spanaway. On 30 July 2008, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) had a groundbreaking 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, so WSDOT added 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.
Read more about this topic: Washington State Route 7
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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the truth of the new is never on the news
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—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
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—Albert Camus (1913–1960)