Phase II: Transportation
North Campus
Gateway Entry
At the I-990 and Audubon Parkway and at Millersport Highway and Audubon Parkway intersections, roundabouts are proposed. Roundabouts provide a traffic calming aspect to vehicular travel, but still allow a continuos flow of traffic. The roundabout design would allow the removal of the elevated sections of the Millersport Highway. Recent studies show that roundabouts have reduced intersection traffic accidents by 75% at intersections where stop signs or signals were previously used for traffic control. These roundabouts also serve as gateways and create a grand sense of place—a transition zone into the campus. The roundabouts also rationalize the campus roadway entrances and reduce the roadway footprint
Roadway Networks
The current roadway networks encapsulate the campus and isolate the university from the community, making non-motorized travel difficult. Therefore, this comprehensive plan will extract non-service vehicles from the heart of the campus and make it more pedestrian friendly. Putnam Way will be converted to a pedestrian walkway and bicycle pathway while continuing to provide access to authorized service vehicles.
With gentle curves and wide lanes, today’s Audubon Parkway practically encourages high speed driving. To provide a safer campus, while still serving as an important circulator road, a traffic calmed Audubon Parkway would feature a smaller median to make it easier for pedestrians to cross, plus traffic rotaries to slow traffic down. Narrowing Audubon Parkway would allow the newly available footprint to be reused as a parallel bicycle and pedestrian path.
Bicycle Facilites
The redesign of Audubon Parkway opens up an opportunity to create a safe, separate shared use pathway for those who travel by foot or bicycle in and around the North Campus. In addition to new bicycle paths a bicycle station and weather protected bicycle parking shall be provided.
Long Term Parking
Some students who live on campus do not drive their cars every day. Instead they use them on weekends or for out of town trips (such as to home). Rather than create more campus parking in the central core areas, if we create long term parking lots, we can shift some student parking to other less busy areas of the campus. Just as long term airport parking lots offer a discount for a slightly further lot, we propose the same type of deal—cheaper parking in exchange for a more remote location.
Stampede Improvements
Improving Stampede bus service can provide good customer service benefits that can be implemented relatively quickly. Methods for improving Stampede bus service includes:
- Deploying low floor transit buses to speed boarding
- Using longer, articulated buses for greater capacity
- Installing real time message signs to inform customers of next bus arrivals
- Providing real time bus arrival information to PDAs, cell phones and other web enabled devices
Intercept Parking
The concept of an Intercept Parking lot is to provide a main garage for cars arriving on campus at key gateway entry points by road, such as at I-990 and Audubon Parkway or at Millersport Highway and Audubon Parkway.
Intercept parking lots serve as a transition point between the regional network of roadways and the campus environment where multimodal transportation services and a pedestrian friendly environment prevails. To link the Intercept Parking lot with the North Campus core, an internal transit system operating at frequent intervals such as a modern streetcar, LRT or bus shuttle service would be provided.
Transit Right of Way
The Transit Right of Way (ROW) is designed to accommodate either a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line, a Light Rail Transit (LRT) line or a modern streetcar line, or an overlay service combining these modes. The proposed North Campus transit right of way is a key organizing element from which stations are strung, like a series of pearls on a necklace. The stations themselves are focal points for new campus transit oriented developments that incorporate a lively mixture of uses—campus buildings, small scale retail and food services, housing (both campus and non campus housing) and other uses that benefit from being on campus.