Boulder City Council to re-evaluate access along U.S. 93

By Jean Reid Norman

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 | 4:45 p.m.

The Boulder City Council plans to take another look at a back road to provide access to Hemenway Valley neighborhoods on the west side of U.S. 93.

The city also will ask the Nevada Department of Transportation to improve the upgrades it has made to the U.S. 93 truck route leading to Lake Mead.

Council members asked City Manager Vicki Mayes and Public Works Director Scott Hansen to schedule public forums in the fall to discuss the four options the city has put together for a road to connect Yucca Street with Marina or Valencia drives.

The four alternatives were presented to homeowners associations in the affected neighborhoods and in public forums last year, and the city decided to postpone any action, because neighbors could not agree whether the access was needed or which was the best alternative.

That decision cost Boulder City the funding for the project, Mayor Roger Tobler said. The Regional Transportation Commission had committed the money to build the access road, but that money has now been directed elsewhere, he said.

“We won’t make everybody happy, but this is something we need to look at,” Tobler said. “For the safety of the community down there, we need to look at this.”

The alternatives include:

-- A northern route that goes from Yucca Street to the utility line corridor north of the Boulder City Animal Shelter and ties into Marina Drive at Lake Superior.

-- A northern one-way couplet, which follows the same northern route but splits after Lakeview Boulevard into two one-way streets, one taking traffic parallel to Valencia toward the lake and the other taking traffic along Marina away from the lake. The advantage of this, Hansen said, is to split the traffic impact along the two streets.

-- A southern route that would go from Yucca Street along the corridor used by the monopole transmission towers, through the Lakeview subdivision behind St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, then parallel with Valencia. It would end at Lake Mountain Drive.

-- A southern one-way couplet, which follows the same southern route but splits after Lakeview to direct lake-bound traffic to a street parallel to Valencia and traffic coming away from the lake on Marina.

All of the alternatives tie into Yucca Street, Hansen said, in the hope that increased traffic to Yucca will justify a traffic light at Yucca and Nevada Highway. The city has asked for a light at the intersection, but the Nevada Department of Transportation has said it does not meet any of the requirements.

Cost estimates done two years ago, when the alternatives were devised, were $2 million to $3 million, Hansen said, but they might be less now, because prices have gone down.

Councilman Duncan McCoy, who asked that the council reconsider the alternatives, said the city needs to come up with a plan and designs for the road, even though there is no money to build it, just in case another round of stimulus money becomes available.

“Should there be any money in the future, I can think of no better project than one of these routes,” McCoy said. “But it needs to be set and ready to go.”

The city also will be speaking with NDOT officials next week to review the improvements done to the truck route in preparation for the opening next year of the Hoover Dam bridge bypass, which will allow heavy truck traffic to come through Boulder City after nine years of being detoured through Laughlin.

The city had asked for stoplights and lower speed limits along the truck route, but NDOT officials said they were not warranted by the amount of anticipated traffic. The NDOT improvements included merge lanes and turn lanes with medians leading into Lake Mountain Drive, Ville Drive and Pacifica Way.

The city will ask that NDOT make those medians more visible with yellow markers the height of a car window, street signs that give more advance notice of the turns, signs asking trucks to use the right lane coming up the hill in the Hemenway Valley and more speed limit signs. The city also will ask that the double row of buttons in the merge lanes be reduced to a single row to indicate that motorists can merge into the travel lane and for the elimination of a one-way sign that is inappropriate.

On Nevada Highway, the city plans to ask NDOT for a crosswalk with safety beacons and medians between Veterans Memorial Drive and Buchanan Boulevard. Hansen noted that with the Gingerwood Mobile Home community on one side of the five-lane highway and businesses on the other, pedestrians frequently are trying to cross the busy street.