Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County

Streetcars ran between Reno and Sparks for the first quarter of the twentieth century, before the lines were pulled in the late 1920s and the towns spent the next half-century relying on a succession of substandard private bus operators. The Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County was formed in 1979 by an act of the Nevada Legislature that consolidated three earlier agencies — the Regional Street and Highway Commission, the Regional Transit Commission, and the Washoe County Area Transportation Study Policy Committee — into a single public authority responsible for transit, roads, and regional transportation planning across the Reno-Sparks metropolitan area. The Citifare bus system the RTC inherited had begun service the year before with five used buses; it now runs more than thirty routes and two bus-rapid-transit lines from a fleet headquartered in Reno.

The commission operates the public transit network of the Reno-Sparks metropolitan area — fixed-route bus, paratransit, two bus-rapid-transit corridors (the Lincoln Line and the Virginia Line), commuter services, and the regional inter-modal centres at CitiCenter in downtown Reno and CitiStation in downtown Sparks. The RTC is also the metropolitan planning organisation responsible for the long-range surface-transportation planning of Washoe County, which includes oversight of regional road and highway projects and coordination with the Nevada Department of Transportation.

What distinguishes the RTC of Washoe County as an operating transit agency is the combination of small-metropolitan scale and the unusually integrated operating mandate. Most American regional transportation authorities run either transit or roads but not both; the RTC runs the public-transit fleet and serves as the metropolitan planning organisation for surface-transportation infrastructure. That dual mandate gives the agency an operational coherence that comparable transit-only authorities have to negotiate across multiple bodies.

The practice has worked with the RTC of Washoe County in Reno on Lean process implementation across operations.