The worst traffic bottlenecks in Puyallup, and why they’re so hard to fix
As a Puyallup resident, Keith Brown knows about traffic. After all, it’s a regular encounter when you live on Shaw Road, a roadway known for its persistent congestion, he says.
During rush hour the street becomes less of a road and more like “a virtual parking lot” as cars approach the traffic signal at 23rd Avenue Southeast.
The 78-year-old says he’s lucky. He’s retired, therefore unbound by the typical work hours that force drivers into afternoon bottlenecks.
But when he sees the long lines of cars stretched outside his home, he can’t help but feel sorry for the folks stuck in the mix.
“It must add tremendously to worker fatigue and frustration,” he said.
For many Puyallup residents like Brown, along with other drivers traversing the city’s main roads for their daily commute, this is a regular experience.
What’s to blame for the persistent Puyallup traffic? Experts say it comes down to city growth.
Over the past 50 years, Pierce County’s population more than doubled from 411,027 in 1970 to an estimated 941, 170 in 2024.
As people realize it is expensive to live in Seattle and other large metro areas, they are moving to areas south of Puyallup where their dollar travels further, Puyallup Public Affairs Officer Eric Johnson said.
“When you’re talking about traffic in Puyallup, you’re really talking about North to South,” Johnson said. “You have people that are coming off of the 167 and the 512 that are going north to Seattle in the morning, and then they’re going south through our city, and into the South Hill region, which is where most of the growth is happening.”
After speaking with city engineers and city residents, we narrowed down some of the worst traffic bottlenecks around Puyallup, and asked what’s being done to fix them.
Shaw Road
As it stands today, Shaw Road is a major arterial stretching from south Puyallup to South Hill. Once you pass Pioneer Way and hit the hill traveling south bound, the road begins to narrow to two lanes lacking sidewalks and bicycle facilities.
Drivers are then at the mercy of the 23rd Avenue Southeast intersection, which sees approximately 20,000 vehicles per day, said Puyallup city engineer Hans Hunger.
Consultants for the Puyallup comprehensive plan graded the operating performance of intersections across the city on a scale from A to F, with A meaning ideal, free-flowing conditions and F indicating overcapacity and excessive delays. These grades are used to establish a standard level of service, giving a guide for project workers to ensure road performance doesn’t drop to a lower grade.
It set the standard level of service for all of its intersections at level D, high density of motorists with stable flow, with three exceptions: Shaw, Meridian and 9th Street Southwest. Those three city roads received an E grade, showing the city’s standard for their intersections are when they function at near capacity with significant delays.
Why set the standard to such a low grade?
“It’s basically establishing a benchmark that we then need to hold ourselves accountable to and make sure that we keep it at that at or above that level,” Johnson said. “You don’t want to set a level of service too high for an intersection that you know that you can’t maintain at that level.”
The influx of traffic has put the city’s planned Shaw Road project at the top of Puyallup’s list of road construction priorities.
To alleviate the congestion, the current phase of the project, estimated to cost around $11.1 million, will widen the roadway from two lanes to four, add a sidewalk on the west side of the roadway and a shared-use roadway on its east side. It will also include a continuous center turn lane to improve accessibility to side streets.
This proposed construction on Shaw Road would primarily take place between 12th Avenue Southeast and 23rd Avenue Southeast where southbound traffic is particularly bad during afternoon commutes.
The only portion of the project’s phase that’s been funded for is the preliminary design phase expected to last until December 2026, as per the city of Puyallup’s website.
But that still leaves final design work and the actual construction of the road, two expensive facets that haven’t found secure funding yet.
Given the city does source the millions of dollars needed for acquiring right of way and extending the road, the construction portion of this phase should end in March 2030, according to the website.
Meridian Avenue/ State Route 161
This major North-South arterial, also known as State Route 161, is over a century old, according to the South Hill Historical Society.
Annual average daily traffic recorded on Meridian adjacent to the Washington State Fairgrounds rounds out to 29,000 vehicles a day, according to data sent to the News Tribune from the city of Puyallup.
At the intersection of Meridian and 128th Street East, the crossing closest to the South Hill border with recent data, the annual average daily traffic was 42,502 in 2024, according to the state traffic count database.
What was once a road for transporting produce from farmland is now a busy street lined with strip malls and local businesses ripe for commerce. This extensive development has built the road out to full capacity, Hans Hunger, a Puyallup city engineer, said.
Despite the difficulties that come with crowded streets, Meridian is not one of the roads city engineers plan to widen out in the long term.
“It’s got so much development alongside it that you couldn’t even imagine how much it would cost if you had to start buying more property to widen them out,” Hunger said.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t any projects in the works to alleviate the congestion.
One of the Washington State Department of Transportation’s State Route 167 Completion Project’s aims is to decrease congestion on nearby roads, which includes Meridian.
Stage 2a of this project involves building a diverging diamond interchange at SR 167 and North Meridian Avenue, widening SR 167 between North Meridian Avenue and State Route 410 and building new bridges over North Meridian Avenue.
This section of the expressway is set to open in late 2027, according to the project webpage.
9th Street Southwest
Ninth Street Southwest is a local two-lane road that begins near the fairgrounds and travels south until it reaches State Route 512 and becomes 94th Avenue East, a county-owned road.
The north-south street has become a popular street for work commuters. Drivers can reach the downtown Sound Transit station to then take the train to their jobs in Seattle.
Traffic counts taken in July 2025 on 9th Street Southwest, between the SR 512 eastbound off ramp and 39th Avenue was around 32,000 vehicles per day, including north and southbound traffic, according to data obtained from the City of Puyallup.
At the intersection of 94th Avenue and 118th Street, a county location closest to the Puyallup border, annual average daily traffic was around 27,300 vehicles in 2025, according to data from Pierce County.
When it comes to construction plans, the city is in its preliminary planning stage to expand the road and accommodate the new traffic, Johnson said.
“We’re really in those early stages right now, but it is something that our folks internally are looking at as far as expansion, to be able to accommodate that additional growth and traffic that we’re seeing here,” Johnson said.
Why is it taking so long?
You may have noticed a pattern among the aforementioned road projects. While progress is being made on the corridors, it’s taking years, sometimes decades, to complete small portions of the projects.
Solving the traffic problem isn’t as simple as building more infrastructure, Hunger said.
“I think you’ve got to look at the problem holistically,” he said. “It even comes down to, where are we building, how are we building and is that adding to the problem or is it reducing the problem.”
Prior to construction, cities have to obtain the necessary permits and permissions from related agencies.
For example, let’s say a proposed road would disturb an area that discharges stormwater, risking pollutants from construction carrying into local waterways. That requires a Construction Stormwater General Permit from the Washington State Department of Ecology.
In order to widen roads, the city also has to acquire right of way from private property owners adjacent to the proposed construction site, which can end up being “extremely expensive,” Johnson said.
If the road veers into tribal territory such as the Puyallup tribe of Indians, governments have to engage with the tribes and obtain permitting before proceeding with construction.
These are only a few of the necessary permissions government agencies have to obtain when working on road improvement projects.
Then comes the even trickier part: funding.
The transportation improvements the City of Puyallup proposes “far exceed” expected transportation funding over the next 20 years, according to its 2044 Comprehensive Plan. The plan forecasts the amount of funding for the next two decades’ transportation projects between $94 and $134 million.
Although hefty sums, that amount of funding won’t address all needs.
After adding up existing planning level estimated costs of baseline projects in the comprehensive plan, The News Tribune found that Puyallup will require at least $347,630,000 in funding.
That sum doesn’t account for 20 other projects listed on the plan that don’t have estimated costs yet.
Puyallup uses a combination of factors to fund its roads. Although the obvious funding source seems like it should be taxes, they mainly go toward maintaining road infrastructure, not constructing new roads, Johnson said.
The other sources include charging developers when they develop a piece of property and enforcing traffic impact fees, which are fees new developments pay to address the added traffic in their area. But these aren’t catch-all, and offer their own challenges to developers and residents alike.
Higher charges on developers means higher housing prices, and the city is limited to charging developments within its jurisdiction. And to gather traffic impact fees from developments outside the city that bring traffic into Puyallup, city and Pierce County engineers have to coordinate with each other, adding another delay to the process.
To get large sums of funding road infrastructure construction projects require, officials turn to grants.
Agencies give out grants to governments for transportation projects on a local, state and federal scale. Federal grants are typically larger, but more difficult to obtain. State grants are easier to obtain but only offer a fraction of the dollars the projects require.
Grants aren’t a perfect solution either. Sometimes the money won’t be available until years after it’s approved, when project logistics have changed and more money is needed. And applying to a grant doesn’t guarantee you’ll receive it.
“You almost can’t do an improvement project without a grant,” Johnson said. “So it’s very competitive.”
One way Puyallup city engineers distinguish their grant applications is by adding transportation options that aren’t just car-related, like bike lanes and pedestrian walkways.
“We always try to make sure to include some sort of non-motorized element or improvement when it comes to these types of projects,” Hunger said. “We’re more likely to secure those grants when we have those elements included.”
In the wake of these time-consuming logistics and uncertain funding sources, it may seem like a future of traffic-less roadways is a far-off fantasy.
“What we’re dealing with now is decades of deferring solving that balance problem,” Johnson said. “If you defer the growth and you defer those revenues over a series of years then it makes a much bigger hole to dig yourself out of.”
But in spite of the delays, city engineers can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“We’re continually trying to work on this problem, and if you’re just ignoring the problem, then there’s no hope,” Hunger said.
