Ask a traffic safety engineer what they think of Boulder Highway, and don’t be surprised if you see them shudder.
The six-lane road is a nightmare of urban traffic design, especially for pedestrians and bicycle riders. Its wide-openness and high speed limits tempt motorists to drive at highway speeds regardless of the posted limits. There’s not much room for bicyclists, and crosswalks are few and far between, which prompts many pedestrians to cross in unprotected areas. What’s more, the road is as wide as a football field is long — 300 feet in many places, and even more at some points. The extreme width, combined with the high speed of traffic, makes these unprotected crossings extremely dangerous.
“If you looked up ‘mean street’ in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of Boulder Highway,” said Erin Breen, a traffic safety researcher who directs the Vulnerable Road Users Project at UNLV.
But now, thanks to good governance at the local, state and national levels, a major redesign of the road is on the horizon.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced it had awarded nearly $40 million in grant funding to the city of Henderson for its Reimagine Boulder Highway project.
This transformative plan involves reducing traffic lanes from six to four, adding two dedicated lanes for bus rapid transit service down the middle, lining the roadway with raised bicycle lanes, building uniform pedestrian walkways, installing crosswalks every third of a mile, upgrading the streetlighting and creating frontage roads for exiting traffic.
It also will require new construction to be built near the roadway as opposed to being fronted with a parking lot or a large swath of landscaping, which is designed to reduce traffic speeds by making the road feel less like a highway and more like a street.
These improvements are a critical need.
From 2006 through 2018, Boulder Highway was the site of nearly 10% of the state’s pedestrian fatalities and was the site of the single deadliest intersection in Nevada — at Sun Valley Drive, in the shadow of the Eastside Cannery resort.
In 2015 alone, 11 pedestrians and one bicyclist died along Boulder Highway after being hit by cars.
This is where the good governance came in. A group of leaders from the Nevada Department of Transportation, the Regional Transportation Commission, Clark County, the cities of Las Vegas and Henderson, UNLV and the business community came together to discuss safety improvements.
Some results of that meeting can be seen today in various parts of the highway, such as better streetlighting and upgraded crosswalks with high-visibility signals. In May 2019, for example, NDOT completed $1.5 million in pedestrian safety improvements at eight trouble spots, where the work included additions of midblock crossings with rapid-flashing beacons, and enhancements of medians.
Once the blueprint for improvements was developed, Southern Nevada’s congressional delegates ran with it and helped procure the federal funding. To its credit, the Biden administration saw the merit in the project and came through with the grant.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., who successfully pitched the project to the Biden administration, said the cooperation at the local level played a key role in obtaining the funding.
“This is really a collaborative community effort, and that’s what makes it happen,” she said during a news conference Tuesday at Henderson City Hall.
Henderson Public Works Director Ed McGuire said the city expected to have full funding for the $130 million project in place and begin construction in 2023.
As of now, he said, plans call for the Henderson portion of the road to transition into stretches to the north of the city limits, which will remain six lanes.
Ideally, though, the entire 15-mile stretch of the highway could be upgraded, and become uniform from end to end.
Boulder Highway simply wasn’t designed to be the urban corridor it has become — it was built to carry traffic at highway speeds between Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam construction site. Now that it’s lined with commercial development and being used by pedestrians, though, it needs to be brought up to modern standards.
It’s to our community’s credit that leaders across jurisdictions recognize this and are working in tandem to make the highway safer.