Downtown tunnels

In its April 2026 request for engineering firms, the City wrote that "freight traffic to and from the east, where the Port serves many markets, is forced through downtown Port Angeles."^[1] Its planned fix to the SR 117 truck route interchange with US 101, project TR1799, aims at "removing approximately 1,400 freight vehicles per day from the historic downtown street grid."^[1] The City's capital plan carries TR1799 at about $13.7 million.^[3]

The adopted 2025 Comprehensive Plan says that "currently, US 101 and SR 117 consist of the City's truck route."^[2] WSDOT counted about 34,000 vehicles a day on US 101 just east of the downtown pair in 2025, about 4% of them trucks, and about 7,400 a day on SR 117, about 19% trucks.^[4]

The question is old. When the City Council dropped Lauridsen Boulevard as a cross-town truck route in 2016, the Peninsula Daily News noted that "trucks still make their way down Front Street," and a downtown business owner told the paper that heavy truck traffic downtown "is not only dangerous, it's not clean."^[5]

On safety, the City's 2024 Local Road Safety Plan says pedestrian and bicycle crashes in Port Angeles "are primarily clustered on the US 101 corridor, 1st Street and Front Street." From 2018 to 2022, 4 of the City's 13 serious-injury crashes involved a pedestrian.^[6]

ConceptTwo tunnels sized for semi-trucks, with 16.5 feet of clearance, mirror today's one-way pair. The Front Street tunnel carries westbound traffic and the First Street tunnel eastbound. Both run under the downtown green corridor from just east of Race Street to Lincoln Street, then side by side under Marine Drive along the western waterfront, and come up at the existing SR 117 Tumwater Truck Route, which already climbs to US 101 west of town. Nothing runs under Lincoln Street, which stays a surface street.

• Front Street tunnel: about 1.57 miles at a 4% maximum grade, about 4,800 feet of it bored. The roadway is up to about 80 feet below ground and dips to about 55 feet below sea level under the waterfront.
• First Street tunnel: about 1.54 miles at 4%, about 4,700 feet bored, dipping to about 50 feet below sea level.
• Portals: the east portals sit just east of Race Street, about 360 feet east on Front and about 430 feet east on First. The west portals sit side by side on Marine Drive about 410 feet east of the SR 117 junction.
• One continuous path: freight and through traffic stay underground for the whole downtown core. At the west end, trucks continue on Marine Drive to the Port or climb SR 117 to US 101.

Figures are from a rough model on USGS elevation data along OpenStreetMap street centerlines.^[17] They are concept numbers, not a design.

With freight and through traffic below, Front Street can become a linear park: trees and rain gardens, a walk and bike path, lawn and room for events, and one shared lane for local trips, transit, deliveries and emergency vehicles. First Street becomes a calmer local street with street trees. The waterfront edge along Railroad Avenue joins up with it.

The Coho ferry terminal sits on Railroad Avenue.^[11] The Front Street tunnel passes that block too deep for a short ramp, so ferry vehicles would use the surface streets, which stay open. Whether that works for ferry trucks and queues is an open question for the ferry operator and the City.

Downtown Port Angeles stands on made ground. In 1914 the town sluiced a hillside into retaining walls and raised "sections of downtown streets up to 15 feet," moving "almost 400,000 cubic yards of earth", and in the 1920s it filled the mud flats from Front Street out to Railroad Avenue.^[7] State geologic mapping shows artificial fill along the waterfront.^[10]

Washington DNR rates the waterfront strip high, or moderate to high, for liquefaction in a large earthquake.^[8] A May 2026 geotechnical report for 801 Marine Drive found saturated dredge fill with "a high potential for soil liquefaction during a large-scale seismic event."^[9] Port Angeles lies above the Cascadia Subduction Zone.^[16]

ConceptThe shallow tunnel sections and portals would sit in that fill, so building them means improving the ground block by block along the line. That is ground work the waterfront may need anyway. How much it would help neighboring buildings is a question for geotechnical engineers and borings, not a promise.

West of Lincoln Street both tunnels run below sea level in saturated fill with tidal groundwater, for well over half a mile. That is the hardest part of the concept: watertight linings, resistance to uplift, and dewatering or ground freezing at the portals. The line also passes the City's combined sewer overflow works and pump station on Marine Drive, which any design would have to work around.

• WSDOT owns the highway. US 101 and SR 117 are state routes. TR1799 is already a WSDOT-oversight project,^[1] and any tunnel that carries US 101 and ties into SR 117 would be a WSDOT project or need WSDOT approval at every step.
• The route through town would change. Moving US 101 through traffic onto SR 117 changes the highway's route through Port Angeles, which is a state decision.
• It overlaps TR1799. Today the SR 117 interchange with US 101 "only allows movement to and from the west."^[1] The tunnels use exactly those movements, and the City's planned two-way interchange serves a related goal, so the two would be planned together.
• Marine Drive at SR 117 would have to be rebuilt to handle tunnel traffic, SR 117 traffic and local trips. That junction has not been designed.

The Race Street tunnel to the Park shares the Front Street portal area. See the Race Street Olympic National Park Project.

Nobody has been contacted, and nothing here implies the involvement or endorsement of any agency, tribe or company.