Missoula’s Reserve Street is one of the busiest and most dangerous stretches of road in western Montana, and a new “menu” of suggested improvements lists the ways that smart design could make it safer and more accommodating to pedestrians and public transit. It’s a fraught time for communities relying on federal dollars, but planning is moving ahead nonetheless.
The city’s soliciting survey responses for a couple more days on the new Reserve Street Safety Action Plan, a preliminary step in a years-long process to revamp the road.
Missoula Associate Transportation Planner Charles Menefee is one of the lead coordinators on the plan, which is a joint project involving the city-county Metropolitan Planning Organization and the Montana Department of Transportation, and mostly funded by a Federal Highway Administration grant.
Menefee notes that the safety plan seeks to balance the needs of the commercial, residential and transportation corridor — the “epitome” of a challenge in urban design. And the rate at which Missoula’s growing — the Mullan Road area west of town especially — promises only more pressure on Missoula’s most rage-inducing road.
“We want to provide the opportunity for people to safely get to their jobs by whatever mechanism they take,” Menefee says. Be it walking, biking, busing, driving, scootering or rolling in a wheelchair.
“We want to provide the opportunity for people to safely get to their jobs by whatever mechanism they take.”
One of the most engaged groups advocating for a better Reserve Street is led by Kevin Davis, who organizes the Let’s Improve Missoula’s Reserve Street Facebook page. Davis hosts a small group that meets regularly with local government representatives. He describes himself as a longtime urban planning enthusiast, and supports lowering traffic speeds and adding bike/ped facilities.
“The safety plan is refreshing, and I’m hopeful,” he says. “I used to bike the corridor and had too many close calls.”
Davis’s group also organizes regular trash cleanups along the corridor, and he’s promoting upcoming cleanups on April 11 and 22 that will also be an opportunity to meet with city staff and tour the fenced-off riverside under the Reserve Street Bridge.
The proposed safety plan identifies several opportunities to reduce serious crashes on the almost 6-mile stretch between I-90 and Brooks Street. For vehicular travel, improvements could include adding more roundabouts or traffic signals, replacing “slip” turn lanes with signalized right-turn lanes, adding protected left-turn signaling, and reducing left-turn access from side streets, which can encourage drivers to take risky swings out into several lanes of oncoming traffic.
Lowering speed is a key part of the safety plan. Menefee says merely posting a lower speed limit is unlikely to change driver behavior, but the city can use design treatments like bulb-outs and medians to subconsciously encourage slower driving.
Plenty of recent public commenters have asked for more ways to safely bike, walk and bus on Reserve, especially the north section. The safety plan details several low-cost treatments, such as pedestrian refuge islands and flashing beacons at crosswalks, and more expensive options including shared-use paths, separated bike lanes and grade-separated crossings. Menefee and other staff also did a “walking audit” along Reserve and found many points where ADA access needs improvement.
“Just meeting ADA accessibility components is going to be a focus,” he says.
Next, the safety plan will go into a design phase, and then the city will tackle the increasingly thorny question of how to fund such an extensive overhaul of the congested thoroughfare, which is part of U.S. Highway 93. These projects usually rely heavily on federal funding, a key source for infrastructure dollars. But federal funds are suddenly unreliable as the Trump administration guts agencies and terminates grants across the government. The U.S. Department of Transportation recently threatened to defund transit improvements for cycling and walking.
City planners are following developments closely and doing their best to move forward.
“It doesn’t seem like there’s much that is defined currently,” Menefee says. “We’ve won over $100 million in federal grant awards in the past handful of years, and that puts us in a great position for completing a lot of necessary construction for Missoula. [Though] we are concerned about the status of grants. Luckily, we have grant agreements in place for pretty much all of our federally awarded projects, and so that is likely to put those grants in sort of a safer state. But we can’t say anything for sure because things are still up in the air.”
In the meantime, he’s trying to take an optimistic view.
“Across party lines, there’s recognition that there’s drastic needs in our infrastructure,” Menefee says. “The prioritization might be different depending on the administration at hand, but I think money will still be there, and projects that represent a variety of needs I hope will fit any type of shift in priority.”
Davis, for his part, welcomes more participation in his citizens’ group, which meets over Zoom on Fridays at 9 a.m. He urges people to pay attention and stay involved in the face of upheaval at the federal level.
“It will be a challenging year,” Davis says. “Just when our little community thinks, ‘Oh, we’re going to have this funding for a study or for safety implementations,’ it may be redirected. It’s all the more important for us to maintain the awareness and engagement and hold both our local and federal officials accountable.”
Find public comment opportunities and more information about the Reserve Street Safety Action Plan here.
