Community Engagement: Making Missoula’s Reserve Street Safer

Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - Once a month the City of Missoula is featured on the Talk Back show, and on Friday, our guests were Aaron Wilson with the Missoula Metropolitan Planning Organization and Charlie Meneffee, Associate Planner, who addressed the ongoing Reserve Street Safety Action Plan.

Wilson began by describing the program.

“For this particular project, we received a federal grant to do a safety study and a Safety Action Plan,” began Wilson. “So this isn't just a plan for the sake of planning, we're not just talking about it. We've come up with what we call an action plan. So what are the specific projects we can do to improve safety on Reserve Street? What are they going to cost? What are those designs going to look like? How quickly can we get them done? What are the ways we can get them done? So it really provides us a roadmap, if you will, for how to start to tackle safety on Reserve Street.”

The Reserve Street Safety Action Plan Discussed on Talk Back

Meneffee said the public has already been engaged in the project.

“We've begun with a round of engagement meetings to understand the public's needs, desires, and concerns around Reserve Street, and then we've supported that with data analysis, primarily travel patterns and crash data to understand that hard data input on what will inform these design decisions that are coming,” said Meneffee.

Wilson acknowledged the challenges that a main artery through Missoula like Reserve Street brings to planning by the city, county, state, and federal highway authorities.

The Study Follows the Entire Length of Reserve Street from Brooks to I-90

“We're trying to take a broad brush,” he said. “What is affecting safety on Reserve Street,  because we're looking at that whole corridor. We're starting right around the Highway 93 or Brooks Street intersection, and looking all the way up to I-90. It's a long stretch of road, and the road is different, right? The issues we see are different when you get into kind of that heavy commercial area, and you see just a lot of activity going to Costco or Target or some other place, versus some of those middle areas where maybe it's more residential, less utilized, people are trying to just kind of get through there efficiently.”

There are Two Public Meetings in March at Hellgate Elementary School

Meneffee provided specific meeting times and places for the public to engage with the city about the future of Reserve Street.

“We have two public meetings that are happening March 4 and March 5,” he said. “I mentioned they're from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the Hellgate Elementary School on Flynn Lane. We hope you all can attend those. If not, we have our Engage Missoula page, located at Engage missoula.com. The page is specifically Reserve Street Safety Action Plan where you'll be able to provide input on the various alternatives that we're looking at.”

Click here to find out more information.