Interstate 82 (I-82): Yakima Valley Route, Miles and Safety Data

How long is I-82?

In the FHWA Route Log for January 2026, I-82 has 143.78 miles, 132.57 of them in Washington and 11.21 in Oregon. No stretch of it doubles as another Interstate, which means the Route Log books every mile of the road to I-82. US 97, US 12 and US 395 each run on it for part of the way, and those US highway overlaps have no effect on the Interstate figures.

Both Wikipedia and Interstate Guide list 143.58 miles, 0.20 short of the federal total. Interstate Guide lists the same 132.57 miles for Washington and 11.01 for Oregon, so the whole difference is in the Oregon row. The crash rates on this page use the Route Log's 132.57 and 11.21 miles.

Where I-82 starts and ends

The western end is a trumpet interchange with I-90 and US 97 southeast of Ellensburg, in Washington's Kittitas Valley. The eastern end is at I-84 and US 30 southwest of Hermiston, Oregon, next to the former Umatilla Chemical Depot. Between them the road runs mostly northwest to southeast.

Leaving Ellensburg with US 97, I-82 heads south over Manastash and Umtanum ridges along the west side of the Yakima Firing Range. Its high point, Vanderbilt Gap, sits at 2,672 feet, about 300 feet below Snoqualmie Pass on I-90. North of Selah it crosses Selah Creek on the Fred G. Redmon Bridge, then drops through Selah Gap into Yakima and Union Gap. US 12 comes on at Yakima for the trip down the Yakima Valley past Zillah, Granger, Sunnyside, Grandview, Prosser and Benton City.

US 12 turns off with I-182 at Goose Gap near West Richland, bound for Richland and Pasco. I-82 bends around the southwest side of Kennewick, south of Badger Mountain, picks up US 395 and climbs into the Horse Heaven Hills. It comes down to Plymouth and takes the Umatilla Bridge across the Columbia into Oregon. US 395 peels off just past the state line at Umatilla, and the final miles cross farm country west of Hermiston to reach I-84.

Interstate junctions along I-82

Read from Ellensburg to Hermiston, the list has just two entries: I-90 at the western end and I-84 at the eastern end. No other main Interstate crosses I-82 between them. Its spur, I-182 at Goose Gap, carries a three-digit number, so it sits with the auxiliary routes lower on the page.

Fatal crashes on I-82

FARS counts 42 deaths in 37 fatal crashes on I-82 from 2020 through 2024, roughly 8 a year. Spread over the route's miles, that is 5.8 deaths per 100 miles a year, about 40 percent below the Interstate average of 9.5. I-82 ranks 42nd of 56 routes, counting from the highest rate. There were 10 deaths in each of 2020 and 2021, 6 in 2022, and 8 in both 2023 and 2024.

Washington recorded 41 of the deaths, for a rate of 6.2. Oregon's 11.21 miles saw 1, too short a stretch to give a rate. By county, Yakima had 22, more than half the total, and Benton had 16. Kittitas, where the road starts at I-90, had 3, and the one Oregon death was in Umatilla County. Yakima also carries the heaviest traffic on I-82: in 2016 about 52,000 vehicles a day used it near SR 24, compared with about 9,100 at the I-90 end.

Counties with the most I-82 crash deaths

Bridges on I-82

The 2025 National Bridge Inventory puts 109 bridges on I-82's main line: 32 rate Good, 66 Fair and 11 Poor, about 10 percent. Every Poor rating is in Washington, which has 97 of the bridges, while none of Oregon's 12 rate Poor. The median bridge was built in 1980, in line with a road whose Yakima Valley, Tri-Cities and Oregon pieces opened between 1979 and 1988.

The Fred G. Redmon Bridge north of Selah is a twinned concrete arch that rises 325 feet over Selah Creek and runs 1,337 feet. It opened in 1971 as the longest concrete arch bridge in North America and kept that title until 1993. At the Columbia, the Umatilla Bridge uses a steel cantilever truss from 1955 for eastbound traffic and a concrete segmental span completed in 1987 for westbound traffic. The crossing also has a path for people on foot and on bikes.

Tolls on I-82

FHWA's toll facility list dated January 1, 2023, has nothing for I-82, and Wikipedia's route article lists no tolls in place today. Driving from Ellensburg to Hermiston, including the Columbia crossing, costs nothing in tolls. A 1999 Oregon study of a north-south Interstate through eastern Oregon, tying in at I-82's eastern end, floated tolls as a way to pay for it but went no further.

I-82 auxiliary routes

I-182 is the only three-digit route off I-82. It leaves at Goose Gap and runs 15.19 miles east to Richland and Pasco, with US 12 following it. The spur came out of the 1973 deal over the Columbia crossing: Tri-Cities and Walla Walla interests wanted a different alignment, Oregon held out for Umatilla, and I-182 was added to serve the Tri-Cities.

Building I-82, from the Yakima bypass to the Columbia

The corridor was authorized in 1956 on a Department of Defense recommendation. It was formally added to the Interstate system on October 17, 1957, and took the I-82 number in 1958. That number had earlier been planned for the corridor that became I-80N, now I-84. Yakima got the first piece, a bypass on the east side of the city finished in November 1963, extended to Union Gap in 1965 and to Selah in 1967. The freeway over the ridges from Ellensburg to Yakima opened on November 12, 1971.

South of Yakima, work waited on an argument between the two states over the alignment. Interstate Guide says that until 1966 the plan cut southeast across the Horse Heaven Hills, and that Senator Warren G. Magnuson helped move it east to serve the Tri-Cities. After the 1973 compromise, the Yakima Valley section went in from 1977 to 1982, ending with Granger to Grandview on October 29, 1982. Washington dedicated its last link, Kiona to south of Kennewick, on February 23, 1986. Oregon opened Umatilla to Hermiston on September 20, 1988, the last Interstate segment finished in that state. Construction crews dug up mastodon and Columbian mammoth tusks near Kiona and Plymouth.

I-82 traffic and road conditions

WSDOT reports on the road from Ellensburg to the Umatilla Bridge, and Oregon's TripCheck handles the 11.21 miles from the bridge to I-84. The stretch people look up most by name is the ridge crossing between Ellensburg and Yakima, which tops out at 2,672 feet at Vanderbilt Gap.

I-82 questions