east as 38th Street and then has another partial cloverleaf interchange with a short freeway and the proposed route of SR 7, which is used by the roadway. The freeway was the busiest segment of the highway in 2007, with an estimated daily average of 27,000 motorists. The median of the freeway is the Tacoma Rail route and at the northern terminus is an interchange with Interstate 5 (I-5). SR 7 ends at the interchange, located near the Tacoma Dome, but the roadway continues north into Downtown Tacoma as I-705. 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. The urban sections of SR 7 were planned to be replaced by the new Mountain Freeway, following the Tacoma Rail corridor between Roy and Tacoma. The northernmost section, between North 38th Street and I-5, opened on February 14, 1968. The remainder of the freeway was never built. In 2002, a new auxiliary route of SR 7, SR 704 was established to provide a bypass of Tacoma to provide direct connections between I-5 and Spanaway. On July 30, 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