Tag: freeway

Photo by RickC at Flickr

Construction on the I-580 freeway between Reno and Washoe Valley is marching on again, after a break of a year or so while a new contractor was found for the project. If you drive 395 up to Reno, you can see a lot of work going on in the hills above Pleasant Valley, as they cut into the hillside for the new roadway. But of course the most striking part of the project is the Galena Creek Bridge they're building to the west of Pleasant Valley.

Rick from washoevalley.org went on a tour of the construction site last week, and put up several pictures on Flickr of the bridge construction. I used one of them at the head of the article; you can find the others by following these links: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.

The Nevada Appeal also wrote three articles on the project this weekend. They must have taken the tour too.

I-580 project a beehive of activity
Freeway's Galena bridge draws most of criticism
Residents, businesses see freeway extension as mixed blessing

So it looks like work is finally starting on the next section of the Carson City Freeway. It has been 20 months since the first section opened in February of 2006. That's 20 months where they could have been working on the freeway, but they weren't. 20 months of wasted time. The Empire State Building was built in 15 months.

So this next section of the freeway will just travel across the Lompa Ranch from Hwy 50 to Fairview Drive, with an underpass at Fifth Street but no interchange. A straight shot across flat ground, less than two miles all together. For this amount of work it's going to take them nearly two years to build. 350 working days, they estimate. Then the next section of the freeway isn't going to even get started until this section is finished. This stop and start method is such a ludicrous way of building the freeway, but they seem to be proud of it.

Plus, how fantastic is it that they're starting work in October, so they'll get about three weeks on the job before it snows and they have to stop for the winter? Sometimes I think they want us to hate them.

Can you say, "A little late?" Freeway work resumes next month.

The 18-month gap from the opening of Phase One to the start of Phase Two is...just par for the course, I guess.

The good news is that NDOT has a plan in the works to build a six-lane freeway through the Carson Valley, with overpasses, real interchanges, and frontage roads running along either side. The bad news is that it isn't going to be built until the year 2030. So just stick around another 23 years, and all your traffic problems will be over.

Of course the problem with this is that every second that ticks by, the costs of building such a freeway go up. So if you think it would be expensive to build now, just wait 23 years and see what the price tag looks like. So this is probably going to turn into another Carson City freeway fiasco, where it takes 50 years to get built and costs hundreds of times what it would if they had just stopped dithering and built the thing.

But at least we're getting our cable barrier, so that will stopgap everything for the next 23-50 years.