The Route Ahead for Whitefish

As population and visitor growth continues to create traffic congestion and strain Whitefish’s infrastructure limits, city planners have finalized a blueprint to steer transportation planning through 2040, updating an outmoded 2010 plan that places a greater emphasis on walking and bicycling and engineering a logical transit network.

Years in the making, the new plan is slated for council consideration on Sept. 6 and identifies a docket of 50 major street network projects, including reconstruction priorities, roadway extensions and mill and overlay projects. It also pegs the total costs of those projects at just shy of $180 million — or about $128 million (69%) short of what the city could afford based on projected revenue estimates.

Many of those projects depend on the city’s future course of development and the directions in which it grows, and some of those costs could be borne by developers or offset by state and federal grant money. But even more pressing than Whitefish’s financial constraints are its geographic limitations, which is why as city planners map out the future of Whitefish’s transportation network, they’re thinking more and more about how to reduce the number of cars gumming up the equation.

“The first phase emphasizes bike and pedestrian transportation through the town as well as public transit,” Craig Workman, the city’s director of public works, told the Beacon. “We know we don’t have an unlimited amount of right-of-way to keep making roads bigger.”

Even as the city seriously considers options for another elevated roadway crossing the railroad tracks and parallel routes to the highway that would ease congestion along Spokane Avenue and Baker Avenue, Whitefish’s major roadways already experience periodic congestion, especially during seasonal peaks. 

With that in mind, the most cost-effective and environmentally friendly measure to cut down on traffic in the immediate future is to make it easier for people not to drive — a concept the new transportation plan embraces.

“There is lots of interest in how we can make it easier for people to get around our community without just constructing more, because we are not really designed for it geographically,” Karin Hilding, who worked as the project engineer on the new transportation plan as well as the one adopted in 2010. “There’s no way to pave our way out of this acceleration of growth and we can’t just keep moving higher volumes of cars through our town, especially at peak times. So biking, walking, carpooling, and public transit are all things the city is exploring. It can make a big difference. But you have to make those alternatives safe and you have to make those alternatives structured.”

Based on a forecast of future conditions, portions of Montana Highway 40, U.S. Highway 93, Baker Avenue, and Wisconsin Avenue are projected to be congested or congesting by 2040, according to the new plan. This totals over eight miles of roadway. Projections for intersection traffic volumes were made for 15 intersections along Highway 93 and Wisconsin Avenue, both for 2020 and 2040. 

“The traffic modeling shows that several intersections along Highway 93 South already function poorly,” the plan states. “By 2040 there will be several intersections along Highway 93 South functioning very poorly.”

Creating a plan to alleviate congestion at the intersections along Highway 93 as it enters downtown Whitefish between 13th and 2nd streets has gained urgency since planning negotiations between the city and the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) reached an impasse in March. Known as the Downtown Whitefish Highway Study, it was prompted by significant population growth in and around the downtown corridor, causing congestion and delays for local travelers, tourists and commercial vehicles that rely on U.S. Highway 93 as an international trade route.

“MDT entered this study with the goal of reducing congestion in downtown Whitefish and our preferred concept reaches this goal in the most efficient way,” Bob Vosen, of the Montana Department of Transportation, said at the time. “However, we don’t want to push anything forward that the community does not want.”

The community’s resistance to MDT’s preferred concept centered on the addition of a northbound lane on Spokane Avenue between 13th and 2nd streets, as well as the addition of a southbound lane on Baker Avenue between the same cross streets.

“I’m confident in our decision to identify our preferred concept,” Vosen added. “We are going to finalize this study and put it on a shelf. We will revisit this study with the City of Whitefish in the future.”

With the plan on the shelf, Whitefish Chamber of Commerce Director Kevin Gartland weighed his options.

“With the plans for improvements to Highway 93 scuttled, we couldn’t just sit here and do nothing about our parking and transportation issues,” Gartland said. “So we put together a transit task force. We’re at gridlock. From the chamber’s perspective, we are looking at ways to take the heat off the traffic coming into and out of town. We brought everyone to the table — hoteliers, businesses, Glacier National Park, the S.N.O.W. Bus, the city. We reviewed the transit element of the city’s transportation plan in detail, and we think the city is going in the right direction with this.”

“At our last board meeting, we decided we would encourage the city to implement and proceed with the transportation plan,” Gartland continued. “But we don’t want this to be a plan that sits around waiting to function. We need to dramatically expand our transit services. Because if we don’t deal with this now, we’ll be sitting here five years from now saying, ‘I wish we’d have dealt with this five years ago.’ I think if you’re looking at $100 million over 10 years versus what you can invest in transit and alternative transportation, you can get a lot more bang for your buck.”

For Hilding, the architect of the 2010 plan as well as the update, a citywide transportation plan is a valuable planning tool serving many functions, including identifying how the grid should grow and who pays for it. It also serves as an important framework that integrates existing and ongoing studies, such as the Highway 93 South Corridor Plan, the Downtown Whitefish Highway Study and the Whitefish Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan adopted in 2017.

Hilding also joined the Whitefish Chamber of Commerce’s Transit Task Force and agrees that an important first step is to forge a memorandum of understanding with partners and stakeholders, including the Mountain Climber, which provides public transportation and paratransit services within Flathead County; the S.N.O.W. Bus, which provides free transportation to and from downtown and Whitefish Mountain Resort, with stops along the way; and the multitude of commercial shuttles operated by the city’s hotels and lodges.

“One thing that’s fortunate is our timing on all this,” Hilding said. “At the same time the community wants to provide a more multimodal transportation system, the federal government is very supportive of a more multimodal approach, so we will be working on grant applications to assist with that.”

Although Hilding lamented some of the pandemic-related delays that beset the plan and stretched its timeframe, she said the ways in which COVID-19 accelerated many of the city’s growth-related challenges, it also provided a glimpse of the future.

“In some ways, I think it was actually beneficial that the planning period was extended,” Hilding said. “Think of the changes that have occurred since our last transportation plan was adopted in 2009. They have been very substantial. We can plan for 20 years down the road, but I think with the pandemic we saw the future happen very quickly. And that may mellow out in terms of growth, but I think everyone noticed a change in the amount of traffic; whether you’re driving or walking around, it’s been busier.”