NDOT hosted a meeting on Wednesday, inviting the community to come out and discuss possible improvement plans for I-80 east of Sparks.
According to the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, right now I-80 has over 52,000 annual average daily traffic, and with our community constantly growing they predict that number will jump up to almost 69,000 by 2050.
"We've seen about a 70% increase in traffic volume over the 2013 to 2023 period, so that's a substantial increase over ten years, and if you look at the congestion and also the amount of crashes that have occurred during that ten-year period, we see a correlating increase," said Chris Kuhn, senior project manager for NDOT.Â
NDOT conducted a crash study between January of 2018 and December of 2022. They say of the 720 total crashes in the corridor, 10% are secondary incidents.
During that time 6 crashes led to 9 deaths, 5 of them occurred under normal driving conditions, and 4 of them happened at night with no lighting.
This is where the proposed improvements come in.
"The main proposed improvement is to widen Interstate 80 between Vista Boulevard and USA Parkway, so we're proposing to widen it from four to six lanes with three lanes in each direction," Kuhn explains.
NDOT is also proposing to reconstruct the main interchanges in the corridor and implement safety improvements such as enhancing acceleration and deceleration lanes, adding 25-50 new truck parking stalls, and adding more ramp lighting.
Kuhn says they do recognize that maintenance and construction is one of the main challenges.
"We understand that there's existing issues out there," he said. "Construction can cause issues as we're going through that whole process, but at the end of the day the goal is to fix the congestion and safety issues."
