Safety upgrades coming soon to Boulder Highway

By Mick Akers

Wednesday, March 15, 2017 | 2 a.m.

A busy, frequently harrowing and sometimes deadly stretch of road in Las Vegas will soon get a series of safety upgrades.

Boulder Highway, its multiple wide lanes and heavy pedestrian traffic forming an increasingly dangerous corridor for decades, is going to have eight areas outfitted with new features to improve safety, the Nevada Department of Transportation announced at a pedestrian safety meeting last week.

Intersections at Oakey Boulevard, Whitney Avenue, Hamilton Avenue, Foster Avenue, Corn Street, Lowery Street and at the VA clinic (1020 S. Boulder Highway) are set to receive the upgrades.

The project along the 14-mile stretch calls for installation of enhanced LED lighting, rapid flashing beacons, advanced warning signs and improved pavement markings and road signs. Installation of pedestrian-refuge islands and channelization islands, also known as s-islands for access control, will be other improvements.

A five-year crash study on Boulder Highway reveals some grim details.

There have been a total of 1,778 crashes, resulting in 48 fatalities and 65 serious injuries.

Although pedestrian crashes (116) made up just 6.5 percent of the incidents in the study, pedestrian deaths (31) made up 65 percent of the fatalities. There were also 17 serious injuries as a result of pedestrian crashes.

There were also 36 bicycle-involved crashes, resulting in seven serious injuries.

“We gathered the crash data from this entire stretch even though we’re doing improvements on eight locations,” said Lori Campbell, project manager for the Boulder Highway corridor safety project. “We wanted to be sure that we were adjusting the right locations.”

Campbell said various factors were considered in choosing the eight locations, including crash data, pedestrian indicators such as bus stops, senior living centers and big box stores, and the presence of casinos or bars.

“Those are the types of things that we look at,” she said. “Then we ranked all of the locations along the route, so crash data and crash fatalities are things that we look at, but the others are those pedestrian indicators.”

NDOT is trying to make all the safety upgrades on the eight locations uniform in appearance to help with recognition.

“It helps with the pedestrians and also the drivers for them to look similar — the ADA-compliant crosswalks, the advanced-warning flashing beacons — so when a pedestrian pushes the button, an advance flasher will go off down the road, too. We do that on roads that have a lot of speed and that are very wide.”

Another key safety feature is the pedestrian-refuge island, which will give pedestrians two opportunities to safely cross the entire highway.

“It’s going to be a two-phase system so they can push the button on one side of the street and they just have to get to the median, have a place where they can stand safely, then push the button again and get to the other side.”

All the streetlights in the eight locations will be upgraded to LED lights, to give both drivers and pedestrians better sight during the nighttime hours.

In open medians where vehicles often are on the wrong side of the road or using them for a quick U-turn, when drivers tend to pay more attention to cars than pedestrians, channelization islands will be installed at six of the eight locations.

The islands are for when you have a lot of cross-traffic in the pedestrian's path, said David Tusler, roadway engineer at Kimley-Horn and Associates. “We’re eliminating traffic coming off these sides streets, and it eliminates the conflict point with pedestrians.”

Construction on the project is slated to kick off in the fall, with a planned completion date by the end of this year.

For questions about the Boulder Highway Pedestrian Safety project, email project manager Lori Campbell at [email protected] and type “Boulder Highway Pedestrian Safety” in the subject line.