The Nevada Department of Transportation recently hit a midpoint project milestone for a $78 million U.S. Highway 95 corridor upgrade that broke ground earlier this year in northwest Las Vegas, NDOT announced this week.
General contractor, Las Vegas Paving, completed a new southbound U.S. Highway 95 bridge at Kyle Canyon Road (Nevada Highway 157) in Clark County.
The concrete cast-in-place structure measures 184 feet long – the length of two basketball courts laid end-to-end – and carries three lanes of traffic, NDOT said. Both directions of traffic will travel over the new southbound structure while construction of the northbound bridge continues. Work will finish in the spring of 2019.
“This project will relieve congestion, improve efficiency and enhance safety in fast-growing northwest Las Vegas while providing capacity for future growth and development,” NDOT Director Rudy Malfabon said in a statement. “Currently, over 52,000 vehicles daily travel through this corridor; however, traffic is expected to more than double over the next two decades.”
The six-mile-long project calls for expanding the highway from four to six lanes from Durango Drive to Kyle Canyon Road, constructing Elkhorn Road carpool access ramps and building a diverging diamond interchange at Kyle Canyon Road with wrong- way driver alert signs.
Wrong-way detection signs have been proven to reduce wrong-way events by 38 percent, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.
Additionally, the project will place 11,200 feet of concrete box storm drainage and 400 feet of open channel between the Centennial Bowl and Grand Teton Drive for the Clark County Regional Flood Control District.
The improvements will require moving enough dirt to fill 304 Olympic-sized swimming pools, placing enough concrete to pave 2,000 driveways, and use enough steel to build 100 Sherman tanks, NDOT said.
Motorists should use caution while traveling through the work zone, heed construction signage, and take alternate detour routes, if possible, NDOT said.