Reno's Growth Needs Better Transit, Not More Lanes

Every few years, someone proposes widening one of Reno's major commuter corridors as the solution to worsening traffic, and every few years, the region discovers that more lanes simply invite more driving. It is a well-documented phenomenon called induced demand, and Reno is not immune to it.

The city's newly funded bus rapid transit corridor along Virginia Street represents a genuinely different approach, and it deserves more enthusiasm than it has received in some corners of local debate. Dedicated transit lanes make buses a time-competitive option against driving, something a standard bus route sharing space with car traffic can rarely achieve.

Skepticism about the project isn't irrational. Reno's low-density development pattern makes transit less convenient for many commuters than it would be in a denser city, and a single corridor won't fix that on its own. But that's an argument for pairing transit investment with the kind of transit-adjacent housing density some current legislation is trying, however imperfectly, to encourage, not an argument for abandoning transit investment altogether.

Reno has tried the more-lanes approach before. It has not solved congestion in the past, and there is no reason to expect a different result this time. A corridor built around moving people rather than cars is worth the disruption of construction, even if the payoff takes longer to materialize than a wider highway would.