Leah Harnack/Mass Transit APRIL/MAY 2017 | MassTransitmag.com | Mass Transit | 11 city partners are faced with and we have designed, in my opinion, extraordinarily eff ective solutions.” Th ey have two projects underway, building off the current RTC Rapid bus rapid transit (BRT), which runs along Virginia Street, the north-south spine of the Reno/ Sparks metropolitan region, between downtown Reno and Meadowood Mall. Once up and running, Public Transportation Director David Jickling said the public response was very good; the perception of the 4 or 5 minutes it was faster to go up and down the corridor with people was huge. Jickling said of the time, “Where we saw service declining with the economy, the rapid corridor increased.” Michael Moreno, RTC public aff airs administrator, pointed out, a double-digit increase. Th e Virginia Street extension is in project development and is a 1.8-mile extension to this existing Rapid line. It continues from the 4th Street Station to the University of Nevada-Reno. Th e initial RTC Rapid route was intended to go to the university, but because they were funding it with local monies and Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) funds, RTC wasn’t able to get that phase in place. Douglas Maloy, P.E., project manager for the project, said they were anticipating getting into the president’s budget for this fi scal year, but with a new presidency, there’s always uncertainty. Th is summer they will fi nish the NEPA process and then it could be December of this year before they know about additional funding. Th e second project underway is the 4th Street/Prater Way Corridor, which is about 10 percent under construction. It runs parallel to the Interstate and the 3.6 miles runs between RTC’s 4th Street Station in downtown Reno and RTC’s Centennial Plaza in downtown Sparks. Today it’s two lanes in each direction and the design takes it down to a BRT project with a road diet, along with adding bicycle lanes and widening sidewalks, making it an ADA-compliant corridor said Planning Director Amy Cummings, AICP/LEED. Gibson said, “It’s going to come out as a model of how you can leverage a roadway project, a transit project, a pedestrian project and a utility project all in one and deliver to your community a substantially improved built environment that the businesses and resident along that corridor are going to be immensely proud to have.” Joe Harrington, public information offi cer, mentioned a local reporter referred to this street as “the ugliest street in Reno.” Going from where it’s at today, to a new road, new sidewalks, new streetlights, underground utilities, this project will transform the street. Jickling stressed, “It’s more than what a typical transit project might be around the country; it’s a complete road. “We’re really going to transform this street; what’s there not to like?” Th e sidewalks were put in, in the 30s and 40s and are in terrible shape. Where not broken, there are street poles placed in the middle of sidewalks, which are in some places barely wide enough for one person to pass. In addition to the corridor transformation, Harrington said public outreach really helped build project support. “We met individually with all of the business owners on a regular basis … in addition to all of the public meetings,” he said. “We have a dedicated project website, we push information a lot of ways, but we really went above and beyond to make sure they felt personally involved in this project.” Cummings said it was very time-intensive but the time was well worth it. Another outreach tool she mentioned was the 4th Prater History Project. “We worked with a local historian and went and interviewed a lot of the long-time business owners, residents, some in the corridor, some no longer living in the corridor. “It got a lot of people engaged,” she said. “Th ey would sit down and tell us their stories but then learn about the project in the process of doing that — people that would normally not come to a transportation public meeting.” Th e stations incorporate images from the history project, including postcards of some of the old motels in the 60s, portraits of people and a photo from the Jack Johnson versus James J. Jeff ries boxing fi ght, which took place at the location of one of the stations. PROJECT MANAGER Jeff Wilbrecht, P.E., demonstrates the virtual reality “walk-through” of the 4th/Prater corridor, which they used at the Transportation Innovation Day at the State Legislature for people to learn more about the project. Devin Crowley, graphic designer – Transportation, at Wood Rodgers, went through Google Street View and modeled every building along the corridor to help people visualize the project’s impact on the community.
MassTransit_AprilMay_2017
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