MISSOULA — When someone asks you which road in Missoula is the busiest, you probably think of Reserve Street.
The roadway saw over 1,600 crashes from 2019 to 2023, with 63 of those crashes resulting in serious injuries. Three were deadly.
Missoula and state transportation officials have been taking steps to reduce the number of incidents and now a coalition of transportation planners has finalized a draft of a plan that they say will improve the safety of Reserve Street.
Watch to learn about the future of Reserve Street:
“As a whole, all of those project interventions are really designed first and foremost to address our known fatal and serious injury crash history along the corridor,” said Charles Menefee, a senior planner at the Missoula Metropolitan Organization.
The Reserve Street Safety Action Plan identifies three main solutions officials will focus on: intersection control, access management and increasing safety for bicyclists and pedestrians.
Prioritizing these issues could result in enhanced pedestrian crossings, new roundabouts, traffic signals or turn restrictions, dynamic speed feedback signs and advanced warning signage.
“A lot of these interventions would involve ease of turning movements onto and off of the corridor, include improved crossing for bicyclists and pedestrians. So the corridor feels less like a barrier to utilize for all modes,” Menefee said.
The plan also includes long-term visions for Reserve Street, such as separated bike lanes and larger sidewalks.
The plan proposes immediate changes too, such as separate packages focusing on specific areas, like the Mullan and Reserve intersection corridor.
But funding remains the key sticking point. The plan calls for a combination of federal, state and local sources to fund the project, although during a final draft plan presentation, project managers stressed federal funding may currently be difficult to obtain.
The plan is now in its finalized draft phase, but people can still weigh in at engagemissoula.com.
