Lane shift puts new twist in Spaghetti Bowl traffic knot

Scott Reeder

Tuesday, Dec. 15, 1998 | 11:18 a.m.

Las Vegas' biggest traffic headache was expected to throb a little harder today.

But northbound traffic on Interstate 15 functioned normally this morning as traffic lanes were temporarily reconfigured to accommodate the $115 million upgrade of the interchange.

"Right now, we have no backup at all," Ben Cass, resident engineer for the Nevada Department of Transportation, said about 8 a.m. today. "But the real test will come this afternoon when we have more northbound traffic."

Construction crews closed the right lane and opened a left lane to traffic.

"Even though the net number of lanes didn't change, we fully expected a traffic jam the first few days," Tom Patton, project manager for Meadow Valley Contractors, said. "Any time you make changes to where traffic merges, you end up having a traffic jam."

In order to mitigate any potential traffic tie-ups, the Nevada Department of Transportation, or NDOT, has put up warning signs.

"We really don't expect to have any major traffic jams because we have the signs, there has been plenty of publicity about this and people learn what to do pretty quickly," Scott Magruder, a spokesman for NDOT, said.

As of 9 p.m. Monday the NDOT had closed the far right lane of northbound I-15 between Charleston Boulevard and U.S. 95.

A far left lane, which had been closed, was reopened.

"Basically, we are going to have the same number of lanes going through the interchange that we (had before the change)," Patton said. "Everyone will just be traveling in a lane farther left than they usually would."

Magruder said engineers are studying the Charleston Boulevard on-ramp to northbound I-15 to see whether temporarily closing it would ease the potential bottleneck.

"We are going to keep an eye on the situation for the first couple of days before we make a decision," he said.

The lanes will be reconfigured for a little more than one month, Magruder said.

"What we are telling people is that it will go back to normal about Jan. 23," he said.

"The lanes are being closed so that they can be resurfaced," Patton said. "Right now they are asphalt and we are repaving them with concrete."

The Spaghetti Bowl, the popular nickname for the interchange, now handles 311,000 vehicles per day. When it was built in 1969, about 30,000 vehicles used it each day. When the interchange upgrade is complete in October 2000, it will be able to handle as many as 375,000, Magruder said.

The ramp linking the northbound lanes of I-15 to the northbound lanes of U.S. 95 is scheduled to be completed by March. A second ramp linking southbound U.S. 95 to southbound I-15 will be finished in April.