Study: Access road can ease congestion at Carson City middle school

Improvements to traffic flow around Eagle Valley Middle School are still in the planning stages after a traffic study completed by local engineering firm Manhard Consulting.

During a presentation at Tuesday’s Carson City School District Board of Trustees meeting, Manhard engineer Mark Rotter and district chief financial officer Andrew Feuling explained the ongoing construction on Eagle Valley’s expansion project has raised concerns about traffic impacts around the campus, including parking and dropoff availability.

To alleviate congestion, the firm’s recent analysis with Reno’s Headway Transportation LLC, an engineering consultant in Reno, demonstrated key areas along East Fifth Street where directing flow via one-way movement through Eagle Valley would better serve its direct incoming and outgoing cars coming from Fifth and Hells Bells Road and onto Carson River Road to a new access road moving east.

The road itself ultimately would cost about $500,000 to $600,000 but is likely to benefit student and staff safety and the community, Feuling said.

The study also identified where parking left levels of service clogged for staff and visitors in certain parking lots as drivers sought to back out and move forward with limited spaces in proximity to the buildings. Those who attempted to exit the campus were hindered as well.

The planned expansion of the middle school already will result in the loss of 12 to 14 parking spaces near the school’s central building, Rotter said. The access road would then include a dropoff area plus parking spaces to compensate for those spaces taken away from behind the building that were not fully used before, Rotter said.

“We’ll have an additional roughly 22 spaces that we’re adding, that’s net over and above what we lost, so we assume we’re going to have about 10 spaces required for administrative staff with the expansion,” he said, noting it would be longer than the dropoff area.

Manhard Consulting is required to obtain a special use permit with Carson City and has been working with the Regional Transportation Commission on these solutions. Rotter said Manhard’s site plan around the middle school campus took into account peak hours of traffic along these heavily traveled roads as well as the roundabout at Fifth Street and Fairview Drive. Construction will include creating righthand turn pockets onto Carson River Road to make it a one-way movement and then left onto the new access road heading eastbound toward the campus.

Eagle Valley’s expansion project includes 10 new classrooms, two new science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) labs, a variety of offices and workrooms, storage space and a courtyard area for outdoor learning among other facilities. But to better serve the public as they come and go, a traffic study was needed to identify peak hours and where streets were being impacted the most.

Final projections on overall costs are still being worked out, Feuling said this week, but the latest estimates of the $12.9 million total with a 5% contingency of $538,000 were last presented in November and those numbers are still expected to drop.

Trustees said there weren’t likely to be many other options to decrease the amount of traffic that occurs around the school daily at Eagle Valley.

“I can’t imagine teachers parking out there,” Trustee Mike Walker said Tuesday. “I wonder if a lot of families aren’t just going to use that lower parking lot because it’s easier for the kids to get to. I wonder if we’re going to have to direct people into using that before it becomes a habit.”

Board President Joe Cacioppo said the population continues to increase and noted “this was not a new problem,” asking if any other traffic solutions might come in the future.

Rotter answered one of the better answers, sooner or later, would be to add onto the roundabout at Fifth Street and Fairview Drive and make it two lanes.

“That’s the ultimate solution,” he said.