Fixing the Gorst corner conundrum in Kitsap County
Feb 27, 2025, 5:00 AM
The Washington State Department of Transportation is looking at way to ease traffic in Gorst in Kitsap County. (Image courtesy of WSDOT)
(Image courtesy of WSDOT)
Less than 500 people live in the small Kitsap County town of Gorst, but thousands of commuters come through the community every day. What are the Washington State Department of Transportation’s (WSDOT) plans to fix the problem?
Gorst sits between Port Orchard and Bremerton. It’s at the base of the Sinclair Inlet where State Route 16 (SR 16) and State Route 3 (SR 3) meet. Those highways were not designed to handle the amount of vehicles that come through there every day.
“This interchange where SR 3 and SR 16 meet is the nexus of a lot of different highways,” WSDOT’s Mark Kurlish said. “If you are going south to north through Kitsap County and through the Kitsap Peninsula, you will at some point go through this curve.”
The morning commute sees a 58% increase between Port Orchard and Bremerton. The afternoon commute sees a 37% increase in the southbound direction.
“It’s a very small community, so it’s disproportionate, really, to the amount of people that live there,” Kurlish said. “It results in traffic impacts that are a challenge at times.”
It is also dangerous. There were more than 1,100 crashes in the area between 2019 and 2023. The road is dark. It is small. There are no shoulders.
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What’s the plan to fix the traffic in Kitsap County’s Gorst?
WSDOT is in the very early stages of exploration. An online public survey has just started, so has some preliminary environment work and outreach to everyone impacted by the eventual plans. That includes residents, commuters, businesses, the local tribes and the U.S. Navy.
And just about everything you can think of is up for discussion.
“We’re in the point of the study where it’s everything but the kitchen sink,” Kurlish said. “We’re looking at everything that we can think of. We’ve screened out very little at this point.”
And Kurlish meant it.
“We’re looking at widening State Route 3,” he shared. “We’re looking at building some kind of bridge over Sinclair Inlet, and we’re also looking at a land bypass, which would be a new road spanning to the west of SR 3.”
There is the potential to take SR 16 and SR 3 and elevate them over the local roads, allowing the through traffic a smoother ride.
WSDOT is asking for your help to guide the process.
“Really what we want from the public right now is we want their input on what we’re looking at,” Kurlish said. “If we bring the public in early to get their feedback, it will certainly help us point in the right direction and point us in the direction that the public wants us to go.”
This early process should be done in about a year. Then it will be up to the state to figure out the best design, working with the local stakeholders. There is no estimate for when the work would begin or when it would be finished. The construction has not been funded.
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