City and MDT Working on Reserve Street Safety Action Plan

Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - The busiest and certainly the most dangerous travel area in Missoula is on and around the Reserve Street Corridor. The City of Missoula, in conjunction with the Montana Department of Transportation, is creating the Reserve Street Safety Action Plan to reduce fatal and serious injury crashes on the roadway.

I spoke with Charlie Menafee, Associate Transportation Planner with the Missoula Metropolitan Planning Organization about the study.

The Reserve Street Safety Action Plan is Underway by MDT

"The plan builds off of a public engagement plan that was completed in 2020 and it really is oriented around identifying engineering-based solutions to safety for all modes of transportation that occur along Reserve Street, and that is from I-90 all the way up to Brooks street,” he said.

Menafee said real changes to Reserve Street are under consideration for safety reasons.

Menafee Said Any Changes to Reserve Street Would Be Based on Safety Issues

“Near, medium, and long-term interventions are engineering approaches that we could fund, whether that be through our traditional programmatic funding mechanisms or winning additional construction grants to then redesign aspects of the corridor to then improve safety,” he said.

Menafee said any construction would be phased in, to reduce the impact on Missoula’s busiest street.

“Really the approach for construction on any corridor of this type is to do a phased approach,” he said. “There isn't necessarily a continual break in traffic operations for an extended time period in which that occurs. So phasing, whether you're doing strategic intersections at a certain period of time and then handling redesign components is sort of the strategy for getting these on the ground.”

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The Question About Lights on the Reserve Street Bridge Came Up Again

I brought up a widely read story on the KGVO website recently about adding lights to the Reserve Street Bridge.

“Lights are an important part of safety and so, for example, when we look at crash history, the point locations of crashes, we're able to see trends of what time crashes occurred,” he said. “So if the bulk of crashes are occurring in a section, say on that bridge at night time, that would indicate that lighting is really the cause of a concerning safety issue, and we're just diving into that data.”

Menafee said the study is underway right now and will wrap up in the fall and winter of 2025.