Talk begins about best fix for gridlock

Montana Department of Transportation Director Mike Tooley experienced the traffic gridlock on West Reserve Drive firsthand during a recent visit to Kalispell to tour the U.S. 93 bypass project.

Tooley and District Administrator Ed Toavs got caught in the late afternoon traffic on the busy east-west connector and sat through eight stoplight changes at West Reserve and Whitefish Stage Road as they made their way east from Home Depot to Whitefish Stage Road, Toavs told the Flathead County commissioners on Monday.

“West Reserve is an issue,” Toavs said during a progress report of planned roadwork in the county. “We’re already getting calls both here [at the Kalispell office of the Department of Transportation] and in Missoula with people asking, ‘What are you guys going to do?’”

The problem with traffic flow is that the U.S. 93 and West Reserve intersection has “four legs,” or traffic lanes in all directions, except on West Reserve, where it turns into two-lane traffic just east of the intersection, Toavs explained. That causes a huge bottleneck, especially during peak times of the day — before and after work and school.

County Commissioner Pam Holmquist said the congestion on West Reserve between U.S. 93 and U.S. 2 is the county’s biggest traffic issue right now.

“It’s a huge problem when you drive that any day of the week,” she said.

Traffic on that stretch of West Reserve is an average of nearly 18,000 vehicles per day, a volume comparable to congested Russell Street in Missoula, Toavs said.

“It’s just bumper to bumper,” he added. “It’s something we’ll need to discuss with the Kalispell TAC [Transportation Advisory Committee] as time goes on. It will be a huge transportation issue.”

Toavs said the state will be looking for its next urban priority road project in Flathead County now that the U.S. 93 bypass project is nearing completion.

“The current urban priority is Four Mile [Drive]. They borrowed ahead on the urban balance and will be back solvent in 2017,” he told the commissioners. At that point the $750,000 annual urban allocation can start building up for another project.

“There is no shortage of urban needs,” Toavs said, adding that West Reserve Drive — which would include a rebuild of the Stillwater River bridge — could be a contender for an urban priority project.

Widening West Reserve from Home Depot past the Whitefish Stage Road intersection could be a relatively affordable urban project, Toavs said. He estimated it would cost $5 million to $7 million to create four lanes on West Reserve that would taper back to two lanes as the road drops down the hill east of Whitefish Stage Road.

“We would have to move utilities to the north, but nobody’s going to question that need,” he said. The additional two lanes would be built on the north side of the road.

Toavs said there has been discussion among state transportation officials about revisiting the Willow Glen connector project, but it may be cost-prohibitive.

“It’s an extremely expensive, probably $8 million to $9 million proposition from Snappy’s to Conrad Drive, and then the rest of Willow Glen needs to be rebuilt,” Toavs said. “I would speculate at least $20 million because you have turn lanes and signals. It’s a good project, but at $750,000 a year, it won’t be in my lifetime unless we can figure out” a different funding scenario.

In 2013, Willow Glen Drive no longer met the criteria to remain on the state’s priority funding list for secondary road improvements, so the road was redesignated as an urban route based on data from the 2010 U.S. Census that showed expanding population and urban limits in Kalispell.

The commissioners then named Reserve Drive between Stillwater and Farm to Market roads as the county’s next secondary road priority. The project would commence around 2021.

Toavs said Flathead County is unique in that it has several road projects competing for a spot on the state secondary priority list, including Whitefish Stage Road, Montana 206 and the North Fork Road.

“There are lots of needs up here,” he said. “They’re competitive projects; it’s a tough pick. Tell me which one of those is a bad project? We have no other counties that have that kind of competition.”

Toavs added that Flathead County’s secondary roads “behave like state primary roads or even national highways.

“This is the most competitive county in the entire state for picking a project,” he said.

Commissioner Gary Krueger said the commissioners opted for Reserve Drive because the state had estimated it could be redone for $5 million to $6 million, while other projects, such as the rebuild of Whitefish Stage Road, would be exorbitantly expensive.

“We were realistic in picking a project that could be done,” Krueger said.

The state recently nominated three road reconstruction projects in Flathead County.

At the top of that list is creating three lanes on Montana 40 from the Dillon/Conn Road intersection to U.S. 93. Toavs noted “pretty bad rutting” on the highway and a need to redeck the bridge. Five years ago the state widened Montana 40 from U.S. 2 to Dillon/Conn Road, creating a continuous turn lane.

A woman involved in a rear-end collision while turning left on the west portion of Montana 40 recently spearheaded a petition and letter-writing campaign about safety issues on the west portion of Montana 40. A petition with some 250 signatures urged the state to create a turn lane.

“We’re looking at three lanes all the way from Dillon/Conn to 93 and would tie that in with the bridge project,” Toavs said. “We’ve had a project nominated in the bridge system to rehabilitate that Whitefish River bridge deck; that’s already in our system. We will put [the road widening] in the system later this year and design work will start.”

The western leg of Montana 40 from U.S. 2 to Dillon/Conn Road already has been widened. The traffic count on Montana 40 is an average of more than 12,000 vehicles per day, and the 20-year growth project is more than 20,000 vehicles per day.

A second project nominated for consideration is surfacing work on Montana 35 from the intersection of U.S. 2 to the east end of the Flathead River Bridge. A third project under consideration is U.S. 93 from mile marker 106 to mile marker 102 in the Somers area, where microsurfacing — a thin overlay in lieu of a full-blown chip-seal — is proposed.

State officials stepped the commissioners through an extensive list of road projects in the county that are either wrapping up or on the schedule for the next couple of years.

“Flathead County has a pile of projects, far more than the rest of Western Montana,” Toavs said.

Currently, the total project amount for Flathead County is between $110 million and $130 million. This includes current active contracts such as the U.S. 93 bypass and planned projects for the next five years in the state’s tentative construction plan, Toavs said. The total spending does not include projects that are unfunded beyond the next five years.

A map of pending road projects can be found on the county’s website at flathead.mt.gov. Click on the commissioners’ current minutes; the map is attached to the May 16 audio file.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.