Better Driving to Bridge the Gap

If you’re a fan of roundabouts, OK. If you’re not, trust me, it is going to make a huge difference.”

I am no angel. The better part of my driving life was spent with one eye on the rearview mirror. But ask yourself today, as I did — when was the last time you worried about being pulled over and ticketed for speeding?

That was just the tip of the iceberg of questions I asked myself after listening to a presentation made by Steve Roark, the Olympic region administrator of the state Department of Transportation, to the Key Peninsula Community Council Feb. 12 in Key Center.

A brief primer: WSDOT, pronounced “Wash-dot” by people in the know, divides the state into six regions. The KP lies within the Olympic region, which contains everything from national parks, military bases, and urban and rural locales. It comprises over 3,000 lane miles, 650 bridges, and roughly 1.8 million people who all want a sound, reliable transportation system, who, like me, want to drive like crazy without a second thought.

Most of the transportation system was constructed during the Eisenhower infrastructure era of the 1950s and ’60s, which wrapped up in the early ’80s.

“We typically design a bridge to last 75 years, and we’ve built a lot of stuff in a small period of time, so it’s all starting to age out,” Roark said.

Sixty-four of those 350 bridges in the Olympic region are rated in poor condition. Thirty-five percent of those 3,000 lane miles in the region are past due for rehabilitation.

For WSDOT, the short 60-day legislative session scheduled to end Mar. 12 is the time for updating supplemental budgets to adjust the state’s biennial budget for inflation and the cost of materials going up. While Roark hears frequent talk of other transportation investments in the legislature, he said that as an agency, WSDOT continues to bring forth critical priorities, and one in particular is the preservation of the system we have today.

The forced closure of the Carbon River Bridge in April 2025 is a symptom of a larger problem, Roark said, “Our transportation assets are aging. It is the highest priority of the agency that we get the level of investment we need.”

“I’ll tell you, for the last 25 years there has been an underinvestment in preservation in favor of expansion of the system’s new projects,” Rorke said. “I’m not saying those aren’t important — those are very important — but there needs to be a balance so we’re really pressing preservation right now.”

Community members voiced safety-focused concerns on well-documented problem areas throughout the Wauna Curves and the local half-joke about how many days a particular guard rail will go without someone crashing into it.

The single best thing Roark said could happen for 302 through Wauna is to have enough investment to put proper shoulders out there that would address the concerns about the curves. Those sorts of things help people correct errors before they run into the guardrail.

The cost and feasibility of shoulder widening through the area are likely to be prohibitively complicated and expensive.

Local voices called out the intersection on SR 302 and Wright-Bliss Road, where drivers cautiously emerge with limited sight distance, further complicated by a Peninsula Light Co. transmission pole that locals said the cooperative prefers not to relocate until the state decides its course for a new highway through that area. A woman at the meeting described the gut-wrenching scene of finding a victim she sought to help after a fatality near her driveway on SR 302 near Rocky Creek.

Every fatality collision that occurs on state highways receives serious attention, documenting road conditions like weather and time of day, the influence of drugs or alcohol, or anything that may have contributed to the event.

But as Roark told his audience that night, “The data speaks for itself.”

Every two years, WSDOT considers traffic safety improvements based on an audit of the severity and frequency of collisions detailed in the Washington State Patrol database.

Key Peninsula News staff independently reviewed those same collision reports from the Washington State Patrol on SR 302 and confirmed the data suggests that driver behavior appears to be the greatest influence as opposed to dangerous driving conditions.

Wright-Bliss Road would benefit from a roundabout in the future, but there is no identified funding source, and any project of that nature would need to compete with other locations.

Some good news was delivered in the proposed roundabout to improve traffic flow where SR 302 intersects 118th Ave. NW. The approximately $3 million improvement project is slated for construction and completion in 2027.

“I would like to say that I wish we had funding to make more improvements that we see on the horizon for 302,” Roark said. 

As for the Purdy Bridge? Roark said, “It’s at least 10 years out, if not more.” 

Earlier studies that explored a number of options for rerouting SR 302 are going nowhere.

“A capital project like that is so expensive. And there are so many competing demands around the state, we’re pretty well stuck with what we’ve got for now in terms of the route, the alignment we have today.”

“As for the SR 302 through Purdy, the single biggest problem is the intersection,” he said. “We don’t have the funding, but when we are able to, it is our intention to put a roundabout at that location.

“If you’re a fan of roundabouts, OK. If you’re not, trust me, it is going to make a huge difference in the operations. It will be near free-flow,” Roark said. 

What Roark’s office hears are continual complaints about the early morning commute and rampant speeding as cars jockey for position entering eastbound onto Highway 16.

With unlimited resources that we would pay for, WSDOT could solve all our problems. Another option is that we solve them ourselves with our own behavior.