Two representatives from the Thurston Regional Planning Council (TRPC) took to the podium during the Tuesday, Feb. 25, Yelm City Council meeting to discuss where TRPC is at in the process of creating a plan for what to do throughout the county during a traffic emergency on Interstate 5 or other major roadways.
Marc Daily, TRPC executive director, said, as many Yelm residents already know, traffic during I-5 emergencies is a huge issue in the local community and throughout Thurston County. Daily said the 2017 train derailment in DuPont was a huge wakeup call to the rest of the region and state as to “how fragile” the transportation system is in this area.
“We’re constrained by Joint Base Lewis-McChord. We’re constrained by Puget Sound, the Nisqually River. There are limited alternate routes to I-5. 507 is the big one,” Daily said.
Daily added that even before his time with TRPC, Yelm, Thurston County and the region have been working on improving congestion issues, and that it remains a point of emphasis. According to Daily, the City of Yelm also has a big piece of involvement in creating detour routes if there were an incident on I-5.
“This effort started when we had the train derailment, and we then saw a lot of issues around communication, understanding of detour routes. TRPC, along with all the jurisdictions, Washington State Patrol, DOT, came together and worked on detour routes for our county. There are a little over 50 detour routes in our county,” Daily said. “This piece of work is taking a look at some of those key routes, and are there things we can do to improve the function of those routes when they’re serving as a detour? The kinds of things we’re talking about would help on everyday function as well.”
Aidan Dixon, TRPC associate planner, also attended the council meeting and said the 2017 Amtrak derailment caused a lot of chaos to the transportation system in this region.
“It was definitely the event that started this process, but there were some more recent events,” Dixon said.
Though the derailment might’ve started TRPC’s efforts in improving detour plans following I-5 disasters, other incidents on the freeway have given TRPC reason to act with a sense of urgency to get the plans in place. Dixon referenced a fiery wrong-way driver crash on I-5 in 2023 near JBLM. It blocked all lanes and caused huge delays in the region.
“Even though 2017 was the big primary mover, these things happen with unfortunate regularity and can pretty much count on one happening every few months on average,” Dixon said. “We haven’t had one happen in a while, but this is all just to say that even though 2017 was the big one, it’s not just an if it’s more of a when. How severe is it? We won’t know until it happens. But it happens a lot.”
According to Dixon, when major highways are shut down due to collisions, flooding or other emergencies, traffic is diverted to detours through local streets. Temporary detours have “pretty significant disruptive effects” on these local communities, he said. These detours often result in major delays to local traffic and motorists driving through the region. Currently, there are detour routes off of I-5 through Yelm, Rainier, Tenino, Centralia, Roy, Olympia, Tumwater, Grand Mound, DuPont and Lakewood.
“More recently, in 2022, we got a Federal Highway Administration service transportation block grant from WSDOT,” Dixon said. “It provided the funding by which we can engage in this project more significantly. The project itself, we’re looking at things from a pretty holistic lens. We’re looking at ways to improve the operational efficiency of the detour routes.”
Dixon clarified that operational efficiency means traffic flow, and that he knows these issues cannot be solved. Instead of working to solve these issues, Dixon said he and TRPC are working toward mitigating the issues as best as possible.
TRPC is also looking at non-operational ways to manage these events, such as improvements to communication efficiency with other surrounding counties about responsibilities and tasks in emergency response.
Dixon also highlighted Yelm, Thurston County and WSDOT efforts toward improving local traffic in the city by adding roundabouts in highly driven intersections. He believes the new roundabouts will help drivers during backups caused by I-5 congestion or closure.
He claimed that a TRPC report showed that roundabouts would not only reduce the total amount of delay during an I-5 closure event, but would also facilitate moving a decent amount of traffic through this region.
“Overall, time, talking about delay, is much lower with a roundabout,” Dixon said. “We’re talking about lower times, but not a lower amount of vehicles. We would be able to facilitate the same or greater amount of vehicles through, with a roundabout, with a lower delay. Anyone, if you know much about roundabouts, this is to be expected.”
TRPC is currently in the process of creating a request for proposals for a consultant to conduct an operational analysis for this project. He hopes to see the plan out in the springtime.
“Our consultant should get to work in the summer, fully on board and really digging into the data. TRPC is going to be creating a resilience strategy, which is essentially my term for nonoperational improvements,” Dixon said.
Dixon expects to return to the Yelm City Council sometime in 2026 to share implementation and action plans, along with what the consultant found.
