Planners offer vision for reduced gridlock

Monday, Dec. 11, 2000 | 11:36 a.m.

Stop-and-go traffic is in your future, but regional traffic planners are hoping to keep that daily aggravation to a minimum.

The Southern Nevada Regional Transportation Commission unveiled three-year and 25-year plans that officials hope will cope with a growth boom that will continue for years.

The cost in federal, state and local funding to keep the cars, buses and bicycles moving is a hefty bill: $3.5 billion for the next three years, $21 billion over the next 25 years.

The growth boom -- in people, cars and visitors -- will continue to define transportation needs for decades, RTC planners and engineers say in documents.

The full commission, an eight-member board culled from regionally elected representatives and charged with making the final policy decisions on transportation planning, will discuss and vote on the plans during its regular meeting Thursday.

Both plans say that the need to keep up with the population increase will be the dominant factor in transportation planning. They call for more road construction, but also stress improvements to mass transit and more access to motoring alternatives -- walking and bicycling.

Transportation planners know "that we can't pave our way out of congestion," Ingrid Yocum, RTC spokeswoman, said.

In fact, planners expect traffic congestion to worsen considerably despite the billions of federal dollars budgeted for new roadways.

During the peak travel hours of 4 to 6 p.m., Southern Nevada commuters are idled in stop-and-go traffic over 341 miles.

By 2025, planners expect that congested traffic will spread over 2,289 miles in the metropolitan area.

While street and highway construction will remain "a vital component" of transportation plans, other means must be used to move people around the region -- and not only to address traffic congestion, Yocum said. Getting people out of cars, or more people to share the cars already on the roads, has to occur to curb air pollution.

But Yocum said the plans don't put a bigger emphasis on alternatives to cars than in the past. What the new plans do is more clearly explain why those alternatives are important, she said.

"There's not any more of a focus on (alternative transportation), but we're focused more on explaining our vision," Yocum said.

That lack of new focus is caused in part by a limited availability of federal funds.

Though the government is pumping billions into new roadways, funding for mass transit remains stalled at a fraction of that.

This year Clark County planners operated the mass transit system on a budget of about $14.5 million, with some of that funding coming from local and state dollars.

And though the federal funding is based on population numbers, new figures from the 2000 Census are expected to boost funding for 2001 by just $2 million.

One group that has been sharply critical of the transportation plans and projects in the Las Vegas Valley is doing an analysis and will submit comments by today, the deadline for written critiques of the plan.

The local Sierra Club is threatening a lawsuit to block widening of U.S. 95 in the valley's northwest, among other actions. Locally and nationally, the group says new and bigger roads aren't the way out of traffic jams; instead, the environmentalists urge more mass transit, foot and pedal-power.

Jane Feldman, conservation committee co-chairwoman for the local group, said she sees some positive aspects in the recent work at the RTC.

"I think there's a beginning, a glimmer of awareness that we need something besides highways," she said of the plans' emphasis on mass transit, bicycle and pedestrian pathways.

Sierra Club members are working with a new transportation planning board, a body that advises the RTC. During the first meeting of the board Thursday, RTC General Manager Jacob Snow talked at length on the need for alternatives to automobiles.

The new advisory board will contribute to another plan for the region's transportation future, board member Feldman said.

But how that board's vision will intersect with the three-year and 25-year plans, "nobody knows," she said.

Feldman said a transportation analyst with the organization is putting together a report for inclusion in the final plans.

But what the environmentalists most want to see is a unified plan that brings together transportation and land-use planning -- and sticks to it, Feldman said. That can be a tough order in a county where land-use plans are regularly and swiftly modified, often in response to the population growth in the region.

The 25-year plan points out that the population almost doubled from 1990 to 2000, "a pace that even outstripped the 1980s' 'boom' years." According to RTC estimates, the population in Clark County grew from about 707,000 in 1990 to 1.31 million in 2000; recent estimates from the county actually put the number higher -- at more than 1.4 million.

Employment and economic activity and the number of visitors, school students and homes at least kept pace with the population growth in that decade, the 25-year plan says. Tellingly, the number of registered cars in the Las Vegas Valley grew even faster -- from just under 500,000 in 1990 to 1.04 million in 1999, a 108 percent rate of the growth.

All of those factors lead to more cars on the roads for longer periods of time, the RTC plan says.

"Significant delays are encountered daily as people travel to work, to shop, to school and other destinations," the 25-year plan states.

The answer, according to planners, is to increase the size and number of roads, upgrade the mass transit system and provide alternatives to car transportation such as walkways and bicycle paths.

All of the goals are under way, RTC staff wrote in the plans. From 1993 to 1999, ridership on the Citizens Area Transit bus service rose 345 percent, from just under 15 million riders to nearly 52 million.

Both plans also refer to some of the other ongoing headaches for transportation planners, particularly the issues of air quality. The Environmental Protection Agency has identified the region as in "serious nonattainment" of air quality standards for fine airborne dust and carbon monoxide.

Improved air quality is listed as a primary goal in the "RTC Vision," the agency's outline of overall strategic objectives. But in doing so, the RTC also says that improving the overall system performance is crucial. That means more and better roads to move people and vehicles around Southern Nevada.

"Ideally, we'll do nothing to worsen air quality, and preferably, we'll be able to improve it," Yocum said.

The cost of the building, improving and maintaining the roads and transportation system will be billions, just in the next three years of the plan.

The 25-year transportation plan also includes long-term projects, such as the $70 million Boulder City bypass designed to connect U.S.95/93 to the Hoover Dam Bypass. The Boulder City bypass, to be funded by the Nevada Department of Transportation, would happen between 2011 and 2015, the plan states.

The plan also details costs associated with the "fixed guideway system," or expanded Strip monorail, for a total of $1.2 billion by year 2020. The first significant capital outlay would begin with the construction start in 2002, at a cost of $59 million.

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