The Nevada Appeal reports that work at the intersection of Roop and Hot Springs Road is just about done. The signals are turned on, the traffic cones are coming down, and soon the intersection will be open in all four directions. And all of this happened three weeks before the deadline. Three weeks! I guess it wasn’t Granite Construction doing the work.
This intersection used to be a four-way crossing until last year. And except for the fact that Hot Springs cuts through the area at a jaunty 45-degree angle, it was a pretty normal intersection. But then something happened: Wal*Mart opened right next door. And when Wal*Mart opened, the stretch of Hot Springs to the north was abandoned and closed off. So this became a three-way intersection, although kind of a half-assed three-way because Hot Springs was still there, just blocked off by barriacades. What the road construction this summer has done is build a new driveway into the Wal*Mart parking lot, about a hundred feet to the south of where Hot Springs used to run. This made it a four-way intersection again, but the whole thing had to be torn up to get all the streets to line up just right. It’s been a mess for a couple of months now, but apparently it’s safe to drive through again.
The article says that even though the signal is turned on, the driveway into Wal*Mart won’t be open for a few more days. So until then if you’re going to Wal*Mart you’ll still have to drive all the way around to College Parkway and come in from that side. But at least everything’s done ahead of schedule for a change!
