Rancho expansion could aid traffic woes

Stephen Curran

Friday, April 1, 2005 | 8:59 a.m.

A key detour around the traffic-and construction-clogged U.S. 95 may be right under area planners' noses, traffic engineers told a Regional Transportation Commission subcommittee Thursday.

Rancho Drive, a mostly four-lane thoroughfare planners hope to expand to a full super-arterial, is now a primary alternative for northwest-bound drivers looking for a leg up on the thousands of other cars heading the same way each day.

But city engineers and planners have not realized the route's full potential, instead using a fraction of the designated right-of-way, meaning it could still be expanded further, said James Caviola, the project's manager for Parsons, a transportation consulting firm contracted by the RTC to do the study.

"There's significant right-of-way to make it a super-arterial," Caviola told the board.

Parsons last year began studying turning the road into a super-arterial, a wider north-south thoroughfare that would carry vehicles at higher speeds and with fewer intersections. Planners do not yet know whether it will include additional lanes, he said.

The project, still in its preliminary phase, is at least five or six years away from completion, depending on what alternative planners choose and whether government funding comes through, Caviola, who addressed the RTC's Executive Advisory Committee on Thursday, said.

It would ultimately continue toward Industrial Road, where it would tie into a planned feeder road at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Industrial Road. The super-arterial would also be an easier way for drivers to make it downtown, Caviola said. Planners estimate the pricetag at roughly $348 million.

The improvements to the existing road would be relatively easy given that the county currently doesn't have to acquire any additional right-of-way, an often costly and time-consuming process that frequently delays the start of other road projects, Caviola said.

Jorge Cervantes, Las Vegas' assistant traffic engineer, said one of the biggest challenges engineers will face is providing adequate access to properties along the roughly seven miles of Rancho. Currently Rancho, which served as U.S. 95 before the freeway was built, is a U.S. 95 business feeder road, he said.

The improvements will be necessary even if the planned widening of U.S. 95 moves forward, especially as population estimates in Clark County are expected to exceed 3 million by 2030, Cervantes said.

"Certainly the widening of 95 will help," he said. "But even then it'll fill up on us. ... It's a corridor we need to do something with."