Interstate 15 maintenance faces a long, difficult road

Friday, Dec. 28, 2001 | 3:19 a.m.

For visitors and residents of Las Vegas Valley, Interstate 15 is more than a road. It's a lifeline.

But it's a lifeline that is frequently congested with frustrated drivers slowed by construction on the aging highway. The roadwork, officials say, is necessary just to keep pace with the growing number of vehicles using it.

And drivers, while seeing temporary easing on some stretches, should get used to work: Throughout the region, state and local agencies are planning to spend billions of dollars to keep the highway functioning. On Nevada's 123-mile stretch of I-15 alone, 16 projects are scheduled for 2002 and 2003.

Transportation planners and engineers say commuters, locally or from California, can expect construction to be a semipermanent part of I-15's landscape. But the work, whether simply maintaining the existing roadway or widening the busy highway, has to go on.

"It's an umbilical cord for our industry," Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority spokesman Rob Powers said. Powers works with officials from the Regional Transportation Commission, Nevada Transportation Department and California Transportation Department -- Caltrans -- to ensure the road continues to bring millions from the Golden State.

RTC General Manager Jacob Snow uses a heart-and-circulatory system comparison. The trouble is that the system "is being filled with plaque. We're suffering from arteriosclerosis," he said.

Southern Nevada's stretch of I-15, a roadway nearing the end of its shelf-life in many sections, has turned into a choke point along the 1,435-mile route with too few lanes for too much traffic and interminable construction projects to correct the deficiencies.

I-15, which runs from Mexico to Canada through six states, was one of the original highways authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Interstate and Defense Highway Act, passed in 1956. Construction started in the early 1960s, and by the mid-1970s, I-15, like the rest of the system, was considered complete.

In the 1960s Gus Michaels, then an engineer with Arizona's Transportation Department, worked on building a short stretch of I-15 that runs through that state and the sheer cliffs of the Virgin River Gorge before entering Utah.

"It was quite an undertaking," said Michaels, now a Nevada Transportation Department assistant district engineer for construction. "The country hasn't seen anything like that before, or I think since."

Michaels spends a lot of his work week driving on the highway. He's seen it age in three decades. The road is handling many more vehicles than it was intended to when it was built, he noted.

"I think it's holding up well," Michaels said. "When it was built, I don't think there were 10 houses within a mile of it.

"It's had more use than anyone anticipated," he said. "It's getting up there, fairly old. I don't know that anyone can expect more than 20, 30 years for pavement ... and what's happened here is pretty much unbelievable with the growth."

In the early 1960s Nevada's entire population was about 300,000. Last year Clark County's population alone was 1.4 million and growing.

In November I-15's northbound lanes at Primm carried more than 570,000 cars from California, 10 percent more than November 2000. That trend has accelerated since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

So pavement that already is reaching the end of its expected life span is additionally stressed by carrying millions more vehicles than originally designed.

Spokesman Bob McKenzie said the Nevada Department of Transportation, charged with improving and rehabilitating the highway, tries to keep construction delays to a minimum. A key part of its strategy is to combine needed work.

For example, it is combining construction on the Sahara Avenue interchange with rebuilding the roadway surface. McKenzie said the department will repeat the pattern as construction continues throughout the length of the highway in the state.

Nonetheless, road engineers know that the road work in Las Vegas can disrupt traffic from Canada to Mexico.

From the north, the highway starts at the Canadian border in Montana, heads south through Salt Lake City, through a 30-mile corner of Arizona and into Nevada and California. Near San Bernardino, Calif., it connects to Interstate 10, one of Los Angeles' major freeways, and to California's Interstate 215 and much of Southern California, including San Diego, where it ends before the Mexican border.

Last year about a third of the 36 million visitors to Las Vegas came from Southern California. About 80 percent of those came by car. That percentage, planners believe, accelerated after Sept. 11 when many abandoned flying as a travel alternative.

Regional planners are seeking ways to relieve the stress on the highway. One answer may be a long-awaited, long-delayed resumption of Amtrak service between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Snow believes that the necessary track upgrades between the cities will be completed by 2003. The train could make the 300-mile journey in about five hours.

That's quicker than many commutes now, especially during the traffic-choked drive to Southern California on Sunday evenings.

"To look at the future, you have to look at 'multimodal,' " which means trains, planes and automobiles, said Tom Skancke, a consultant on transportation issues for the local convention authority.

"You have got to be able to move more people out of the Los Angeles basin," Skancke said. "The problem's not going to be solved by rights-of-way for the freeways."

Longer term, boosters are still trying to secure federal funding for an even swifter train using "magnetic-levitation" technology, in which a bullet train would float inches above a single track.

And officials are also planning new roads.

"I-15 alone is just not going to do it," Snow said.

He is looking at a future that would include the Ivanpah Valley airport about 35 miles south of Las Vegas. The existing I-15 infrastructure -- even with expansions under way -- cannot handle the tens of millions of passengers projected for the new airport, planners believe.

The fall-off in air passengers after Sept. 11 might push the estimated opening date of the new airport past 2011, airport officials have said. But they still believe that ultimately the Ivanpah airport will be needed -- and so will new ways to get passengers there and back.

On the table are proposals to turn Las Vegas Boulevard south of town into a new multilane highway running parallel to I-15, and to convert Rainbow Boulevard on the valley's west side into a highway running all the way to the new airport.

Skancke also is pushing for a new, $1.2 billion road to link California's Victorville and Palmdale, a project he believes will speed traffic over the high desert mountains and on to Las Vegas.

But even if everything on the regional wish list comes true, I-15 will still be the crucial conduit of people and commerce in Southern Nevada, officials say.

"It's going to be the most important system in terms of surface transportation, in terms of regional transportation," Snow said.

The road isn't just essential for casinos. NDOT and Regional Transportation Commission officials say it is also the transit axis for Clark County.

Construction can play havoc on daily commutes. Ongoing construction to widen and repave the highway at Sahara Avenue has created "a bottleneck," Kent Cooper, transportation department program development manager, said.

But the construction should be over by March, weather permitting, about three months ahead of schedule, he said.

While highway widening will go on for years south of Las Vegas and in California, in-town commuters can enjoy driving -- for at least a few months -- without construction delays, he said.

"It will be the first time in about 15 years that we haven't had construction in the center of town."

The respite will not be long. The department plans to start a $61 million reconstruction of the Charleston Boulevard ramps and a $20 million upgrade of the Lamb Boulevard in 2003, both lasting a year to 18 months.

Longer term, Cooper outlines a host of construction projects. One will be an extra lane on I-15 south between Russell Road and the Las Vegas Beltway exit.

Another project that drivers could see before 2011 would be widening from four lanes to six lanes of the highway all the way from Lake Mead Boulevard to Apex. The estimated cost would be about $85 million.

The other side of town will also get work. Transportation planners expect to spend more than $300 million to widen the highway from Tropicana Avenue to the state border, through 2011.

The work would eventually expand the highway from Tropicana to St. Rose Parkway to 10 lanes and from St. Rose to the stateline to eight lanes.

Another big change could come if and when NDOT establishes "ramp controls" on urban entrances to the highway. Essentially, those controls would be traffic lights, allowing cars and trucks on the highway in a staggered fashion to reduce congestion.

Cooper said that within five years, a "freeway management center" planned at Decatur Boulevard and Interstate 215 will provide computerized traffic control that integrates the arterial roads with the highways.

Bringing the two sides together is generally a new step for traffic control, Cooper said. But it is important, otherwise traffic can be bottled up on a interstate on-ramp and back into the surface street.

"To look at them separately is sticking your head in the sand," he said. "You've got to have them function together."

But among the projects, the highway widening effort will be the biggest. Cooper said the southbound widening -- adding a third lane between St. Rose Parkway and the California state line -- is the most important.

Cooper noted that the annual traffic average, so far, probably doesn't justify a third lane to California. The problem is that most of the visitors from California leave town at the same time.

"People come to Las Vegas at varied times, but they were all trying to get home Sunday afternoon," he said. "That's why we prioritized the southbound section first."

California is also going forward with upgrades from Victorville to Barstow, but its "times frames are a lot longer than ours -- five to seven years for relief in the California section," Cooper said.

One reason the work is going on in California is that Nevada has helped fund the construction -- about $14 million worth. It was a small part of the hundreds of millions needed, but served as seed money, officials say.

California hasn't always seen the importance of upgrading the road -- to the occasional frustration of some planners and engineers in Nevada.

"California has always been ambivalent when it comes to their residents gambling here," Cooper said. "That's something that Nevada has always faced in our discussions."

But Cooper said the growing importance of Southern Nevada as a market for California's goods and services has pushed I-15 up the list of its priorities.

"Over the next six years, I-15 will undergo improvements that will enhance freeway operations for commercial and recreational traffic," said Anne Mayer, California Transportation Department director for the region. She called the roadway "a vital economic link between the states."

Caltrans and NDOT are working closely on the highway upgrade and widening, Mayer and Cooper said.

Skancke said part of the difficulty in California has been strong environmental protection laws and that dozens of agencies are involved in building highways.

"Rights-of-way and environmental issues slow the process in California," he said. "But Caltrans has been extremely cooperative. No one's dragging their feet."

McKenzie said one thing drivers can count on: Regional cooperation and planning are better organized than ever before. That means that work will go more smoothly than in the past.

But drivers will still face some inconvenience and need to be careful driving around construction areas, he said. That won't change in the foreseeable future, especially if Southern Nevada keeps growing as fast as it has over the last three decades.

"Even in established cities, highway construction is a never-ending story," McKenzie said. "It's the same in Las Vegas."

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