Max Burris

Coby Foster
Noah Foree
Logan Orals

Executive Summary

There are very big plans on the rise at the University of Kentucky regarding
transportation around campus. The transportation department and the UK sustainability office
work hand and hand to develop an efficient and enticing program for students and staff. The four
main pillars of parking limitation, rider incentives, bicycle transportation, and pedestrian travel.
These main initiatives for sustainability of transportation are what we focused on as a group, and
took a deep dive into these categories specifically. The methodological techniques and secondary
research involved led to a number of improvements that could be made and recommended to the
Sustainability office. Creative surveys based on questions we had also provided an outlet to find
out what was working and what was not here at UK. These results created a fine line coming
from the source itself. The benefits from this report that can help the UK office of Sustainability
and the transportation sector could pay extreme dividends in the long run.

Introduction

The University of Kentucky has over 30,000 students and a growing concern with both
students and faculty is transportation. With so many students needing transportation to campus
and around campus, a big goal for transportation is to have students and faculty use sustainable
methods of transportation. The UK Sustainability Strategic Plan for transportation is, “Promote
safety, health and environmental stewardship by providing incentives and programs designed to
increase the number of faculty, staff and students using sustainable transportation options.”
The problem is the sustainable transportation on campus is not always the best option for
most students. Sustainable transportation options on campus are walking, riding, and biking The
campus is constantly looking to improve and provide convenience for their students. It is the
University’s responsibility to provide locations and ways for students to effectively get around
campus and ensure that they are managed effectively and efficiently. The University of Kentucky
has implemented many ways for students to travel, but there still seems to be some lack in the
efficiency and the sustainability of the overall transportation spectrum. The management of
space, transportation provided, and capital planning seems to have decreased support, usability,
and have a few functionality issues. Some of the things already provided are simply not
promoted enough or used to their full potential.

Methodology

Pedestrian Traffic
 One method that could be implemented to overall improve the sustainable transportation
is improving pedestrian safety and traffic flow, ultimately allowing more students to walk to
campus more efficiently and conveniently. The way to do this would be to implement more all-
pedestrian walkways also known as pedestrian scrambles. Our method to collect data for
implementing more pedestrian scrambles was to study pedestrian traffic, then conduct a survey.
Our study took place on the University of Kentucky campus and surrounding campus housing
areas. UK already has one pedestrian scramble, so we decided to observe and compare to other
busy crosswalks around campus. With the other crosswalks we wanted to monitor the busyness
and efficiency. Then for the pedestrian scramble on campus we wanted to see how well it
worked and if it was more efficient than other crosswalks. We went around campus and
monitored crosswalks at the busiest times, the 15 minutes at the end of each hour when students
would be leaving and other students coming to class. We figured out which crosswalks were the
busiest and monitored the pedestrian scramble then we used the data we collected to make a
survey for students to see if they agreed that implementing more pedestrian scrambles would
improve pedestrian safety and traffic flow, ultimately allowing more students to walk to campus
more efficiently and conveniently. Once we formatted the survey, then we shared it with 100
students we knew who lived off campus and had used the busiest crosswalks. Then after we got
the results, we put them into excel and made graphs to analyze students’ responses.

This is the pedestrian scramble on University of Kentucky’s campus at Prall Street and S.
Limestone. In our interview Sandra Broadus, the Alternative Transportation Manager who also
works close with the office of sustainability, she said, “As far as we know this is the only all way
pedestrian crosswalk in the state.” We use methods of secondary research in the application
portion of pedestrian traffic to apply our observations and survey results and see how it would
affect the campus if another scramble was implemented based on secondary research.

Parking limitation

Another method that could be implemented to overall improve the efficiency and
convenience of transportation is limiting and sustaining the amount of parking allowed on
campus. This would provide many beneficial factors. It is understandable that this may seem
inconvenient at first, but if you look at this from a larger perspective you would notice that this
would provide many ways to improve traffic flow and free up space on and around campus.
After various research it was concluded that there are several campuses that have already put this
into effect and have seen a great improvement in their transportation and overall campus space
usage. According to the Ny Times article “On the College Campus of the Future Parking May
Be a Relic” several of the campuses that have been influenced and put into the effect of limiting
the parking have “created an opportunity to rethink the need for aging garages”. By limiting
parking spaces, you no longer have to take into account things like parking garages, managing
spaces, or reducing traffic flow. If you use all the space on your campus in a thoughtful way and
improve other methods of transportation around campus this can overall reduce the feeling of a
crowded campus. This would not only benefit the efficiency of the traffic flow on and
surrounding the campus, but also improve cost savings. You won’t simply have a space on
campus that is just for a parking structure that has no other beneficial factor other than to park
cars. It creates a dull environment and is hard to “show off” a campus that is simply just sitting
grey parking garages. These parking garages are being used just for convenience and provide no
further benefit other than that. Altering these into classrooms or omitting them from the campus
would allow room for other things.

Transportation Incentives

The office of sustainability at University of Kentucky takes pride in seeking new

opportunities for students and staff to use these transportation resources. The implementation of
busses, bicycles, and electric scooters have significantly decreased greenhouse gasses and traffic
flow on campus. The list of benefits goes on and utilizing public transportation instead of
personal vehicles on college campuses is something that the University highly endorses. The
University of Kentucky has implemented a number of incentives for students and faculty to
increase the likelihood of usage on campus. The UK office of Sustainability has been able to
develop plans focusing on these incentives so that more people will be inclined to use University
transportation.
According to the UK office of sustainability, the main idea that surrounds all these
incentives is a “commute club program” that is in the works at the University of Kentucky. This
will mainly focus on the initiative to get students on board with using public transportation
around campus through incentives. With this comes several plans including a “cash out” program
for any valid UK permit holder, where any student or faculty member could receive cash
compensation for not renewing their parking permit. There are also proposals for this club to
provide readily available ride sharing options for these club members and even personalized
commute plans that could be implemented as well. Another focus that this club looks to develop
is a ride home service (UK Sustainability Strategic Plan 24). While the busses run throughout the
course of the day from 6 am to midnight on weekdays and 12 pm to 12 am on weekends, there
are still people who find themselves struggling to receive rides back to their residences. The
accessibility and convenience of personal vehicles on campus makes a big difference for students
and staff when deciding on what mode of transportation they will use. These new programs and
commute club will focus on increasing ridership of the public transportation available.

Improvement of Bicycle Transportation

Although the University of Kentucky is one of the most bicycle friendly campuses in the
United States, it is not the most convenient for upperclassmen students. University of Kentucky
provides a UK bike voucher incentive program that provides students with vouchers that can be
used at a local select of bike shops. However, the students must be eligible in order to be
accepted into this program. One of the requirements to be eligible for this incentive is that the
student must have an expected graduation date of at least two academic years. According to the
U.S. News & World Report, out of the 22,316 total undergraduate students about “69 % of
students live off campus”. A possible solution would be removing this requirement to make
upperclassmen students eligible. This solution should inspire more upperclassmen students to be
more obligated to sign up for this program.
One method to collect data would be implementing observations of common bicycle
paths and conducting a survey. The study took place on the University of Kentucky campus and
the common bike paths used for students that live off campus. The most typical bike paths for off
campus students were the bike path on Virginia Avenue, Avenue of Champions and Limestone.
Below are images of the bicycle paths observed.
 Each bike path was observed for a total of 15 minutes before each hour, typically when
students arrive and leave from class. We asked students what year of school they were on, if they
were familiar with the UK bike voucher program and if they were interested in this change to the
eligibility program.

Results

Pedestrian Traffic Results

While observing the crosswalks around campus we concluded that the busiest ones were,
Ave of Champions at front of the student center, the intersection of S. Limestone, Huguelet Dr,
and Virginia Ave, the intersection of S. Broadway, Curry Ave, and Foreman Ave, and the
intersection of University Dr and Cooper Dr. These crosswalks were not only busy, but students
were waiting up to 6 minutes before they got across. Then after they crossed many would have to
cross again taking even more time. At the pedestrian scramble at Prall St and S. Limestone
student had to wait no longer than 4 minutes and since it was an all-way crosswalk none of the
students had to cross again. One drawback to the pedestrian scramble was all traffic was stopped
and students who had not made it to the pedestrian scramble would jaywalk across the street
because traffic was stopped. This shows a possible problem with the safety of the scramble, but
if everyone obeys the law the scramble is very safe. In fact the pedestrian scramble should
eliminate collisions between turning cars and pedestrians trying to cross. This makes a pedestrian
scramble a safer alternative than a regular crosswalk. After collecting data from both the
pedestrian scramble and crosswalks around campus we determined from our observations that
the pedestrian scramble was more convenient, efficient and safe, than the busy crosswalks
around campus. For our second data collection we used our observations to make a survey for
100 upperclassmen that are familiar with these crosswalks.

Survey: Question 1
 This question was to see if the students have experienced what this survey is all about.
And 87 of the 100 had used the crosswalk therefore giving us a knowledgeable group of
respondents.

Survey: Question 2
For question two the survey provided information on pedestrian scrambles and how they
work, then asked the question.
This question was to see if the students’ experiences with pedestrian traffic matched up with the
results from our observations. The students’ results compliment our observations of pedestrian
scrambles being more convenient with 63 of the students agreeing. The 21 that said in some
cases more convenient, still agrees with our observations because those cases that are more
convenient happen at the busier crosswalks and the cases when pedestrian scramble is not
convenient happens in less busy crosswalks hinting the answer some cases are more convenient.
Overall, 84 of the 100 students agree that a pedestrian scramble is more convenient than a
crosswalk. This justifies through observations and firsthand student input that a pedestrian
scramble is more convenient that a crosswalk. This means that adding a pedestrian scramble on
campus would improve pedestrian traffic flow, ultimately allowing more students to walk to
campus more efficiently and conveniently.

Survey: Question 3
This question just asked to see if students would like to see more pedestrian scrambles on
campus. The results mean that it not only would be more convenient and efficient, but students
agree that they want to see more scrambles on campus. Which would allow students to get what
they want and make walking more convenient, ultimately getting more students to practice
sustainable transportation and walk to campus.

Survey: Question 4
If the respondent said they would like to see more pedestrian scrambles around campus
the survey asked where. These were the four busiest crosswalks on and near campus that we
found from our observations.
The result from the survey is that the busiest crosswalk and best place to see put a pedestrian
scramble on campus according to the students would be on Ave of Champions at the front of the
student center.

Parking limitations

The results from the research and analysis from limiting parking are quite behavioral as
you would think. Parking is somewhat a natural occurrence caused from driving. According to
parking-net “it is estimated that nearly 30% of cars circling a city at any given time are drivers
looking for parking.” You can observe for yourself just being on campus that areas with more
parking result and correlate with the most congested roads. The peak times of traffic flow at UK
and the amount of students or faculty parked go very hand and hand. With UK continually
providing and allowing excessive parking on campus it just causes more traffic in certain areas.
For instance, building the new parking garages on North Campus. By limiting the areas or how
much parking goes on we can control somewhat of the traffic flow and efficiencies for those to
get around on campus or surrounding it.

Transportation Incentives
 While polling groups of roughly 50 to 25 people on topics regarding incentives and
potential benefits, a few key questions were able to arise. After making observations of potential
incentives on campus, the following questions were able to be asked in order to gain a better
understanding on why it seemed like there was a lack of usage in these programs.

Survey: Question 1
One of the first things that can be noticed while on campus is the surplus of personal
vehicles and traffic here on UKs campus. There also seemed to be an absurdly low number of
bikes being used on a regular basis as well. From this, I was able to just ask a simple question if
students were even aware of these incentive programs for UK transportation. The results were
very shocking.

Survey: Question 2
 Hearing what the students and staff are interested in regarding incentives and how they
can personally benefit is probably one of the most important responses in order to improve the
transportation system. 25 students and staff were able to give open response answers based on
what they think would make a great incentive program. The top four answers were the following:
Monetary compensation, a rewards program from transportation usage, better bus efficiency, and
parking ticket reduction.

Improvement of Bicycle Transportation Results

After observing the avenue of champions and Virginia bike paths, we collected data from a total
of 48 students. These bike paths were not very busy and consisted of mainly first and second
year students and mainly riding on the bike path towards campus. We did also observe many
students that were riding the lime or spin scooters; however, data was not collected from those
persons. The results from each of the survey questions will be displayed below:

Survey Question One:

The question that was asked was “what year of school are you currently in?” The results mainly
consisted of first- and second-year students. A bar graph was created below to illustrate the
results:

Survey Question Two:

The second survey question that was asked was “ If the student knew of the UK Bike incentive
program”. The results for the second survey show that about 29 of the 49 students observed did
not know of the UK Bike incentive program and 10 of the students knew about the program.
Below is a bar graph that illustrates the results for the second survey question:

Survey Question Three:

For the third question on the survey, the question that was asked was “what are your thoughts on
the update for the eligibility requirements for the UK Bike Incentive Program”. The results for
the third survey question are displayed below.
Application

Pedestrian Traffic

The application for pedestrian traffic is where our secondary research comes in. We
collected our data from observations and a survey, to see if an all pedestrian crosswalk would
allow students to walk to campus more efficiently and conveniently. With secondary research,
we can predict the results of applying a pedestrian scramble and see if it will be more efficient
and convenient based on secondary research. UC Berkeley did a research report evaluating the
pedestrian scramble in Oakland, it said this about pedestrian flow, “Pedestrians who previously
would require two signal phases to get to the diagonal corner could, with the scramble in place,
now cross the intersection at a diagonal during one signal phase.” This implies that being able to
cross diagonally makes a crosswalk more efficient and convenient making two crossings into
one. The secondary research matches our results we got of a pedestrian crosswalk being more
efficient and convenient. In the article Pedestrian Scramble Operations, a pedestrian scramble
was implemented in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. They researched pedestrian scrambles and studied
the one that was implemented in Oakland before implementing their own. The article had this to
say about pedestrian-vehicle conflicts, “Therefore, the implementation of PSO is found to have a
net safety effect. This decrease in conflicts was consistent with the findings from previous
studies.” PSO just stands for pedestrian scramble operation. The secondary research matches our
observation of the pedestrian scramble providing more safety to students. If we apply pedestrian
scrambles it will make pedestrian traffic more efficient, convenient and safe for pedestrians.

Parking limitation

The application for parking limitation and providing less parking would improve traffic
flow and overall efficiency for our campus. It has been studied and researched by various people,
and shows to be relevant across nearly anywhere with high traffic flow. One study found from
parking-net is “more than 10% of the local circulation as drivers can spend 20 minutes looking
for a parking spot.” This research is relevant to larger cities and is somewhat vague as to what is
considered a larger city, but Lexington is fairly populated especially in areas around campus. The
high amounts of traffic in towns are typically near colleges and around downtown areas which
require the most amount of parking. Fortunately, for Lexington, both of those are located very
closely together. In a study from China, concluded from “The effect of curb parking on road
capacity and traffic safety” that the parking on curbside roads was even a more detrimental issue
and caused various traffic flow reduction especially during peak traffic times. There are many
options to park curbside all around the University of Kentucky’s campus.
Shown above is the study mentioned above. It shows the correlation of traffic times vs the
capacity of volume in the merging lane due. As you can see it peaks at around 8-9am on the
streets with the most parking available curbside in a very convenient destination. This in returns
causes traffic flow to be reduced all due to something as simple as parking or merging from
parking. This is very relevant to UK in various areas around campus. Specifically around north
campus where many meters are located curbside.

Transportation Incentives

Sustainability and growth of public transportation has significantly improved over the
years at The University of Kentucky. Along with the bus systems that have been implemented,
bicycles and electric scooters have been brought to the University as well. More recently in
November of 2018, a report from University of Kentucky Student News stated, “Bicycling
Magazine, the world's leading cycling magazine, has named UK the most bicycle-friendly
college in America out of 45 universities” (Girves 1). The incentives currently in place for these
resources are clearly not heavily advertised as much as they should be, and in an interview with
Sandra Broadus of the UK Transportation Department, she stated that “Incentives go on a cycle
from August through May… They start advertising in april… Wildcat rundown, uk now, screens
in student center, press releases, goes to class and talk about it, and social media with main UK
pages” (Broadus) are a list of sources that advertise these programs throughout the University.
Although some efforts are made to make these incentives known, if the UK wants to see
campuswide change and a movement towards using public transportation there needs to be more
action taken by the department to advertise. More useful tips to help the University of Kentucky
and their Sustainability Offices’ mission to make incentives more useful is look at what other
groups and areas around the world are doing. In a scholarly article from the Science Direct
website, Ming-Tsung Lee analyzed Tiachung City in China and what they have done to increase
ridership through incentives. “Increasing bus revenue vehicle-kilometers, such as route length or
number of scheduled runs, can promote the usage of public transportation” (Lee 54) appears to
be one of the top reasons for increased usage. The incentives for riders not just at UK but around
the world differ from person to person, however it is apparent that there are many things that
riders want to see from their respective providers. Here at University of Kentucky, the Office of
Sustainability must take action to attend to the needs of the student and staff in regards to
transportation. It is vital in order to maintain ridership and increase usage so there can be a
standard set for future attendees as well. The transportation of roughly 50,000 people on a given
day sounds like an impossible task, but with implementation of certain incentives and policies,
campus transportation can remain super effective.

Improvement of Bicycle Transportation

After analysis of the result from the survey, the results support that the UK Bike Incentive
Program favors lower classman rather than upperclassmen. After analysis of the second survey
question, any first and second year students know about this program rather than upperclassmen.
In comparison to University of Cincinnati, University of Cincinnati has a program called the
“UC Bike Kitchen”, in which is a free service for all students and faculty at UC. It is available
for any graduation year. According to UC News, University of Cincinnati campus is “is the
University of Cincinnati’s Uptown campus as one of the country’s most bicycle-friendly”. The
program has no eligibility in which makes transportation very efficient and convenient for
students and staff.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the problem is the sustainable transportation on campus is not always the
best option for most students. The objective of this report was to find ways to make
transportation more efficient and convenient for students to use as well as progress in helping
sustain the campus. The way to make pedestrian traffic more efficient, convenient and safe is to
implement pedestrian scrambles. The best place to implement one would be at Avenue of
Champions. These scrambles do not have to happen right away. In our interview with Sandra
Broadus she mentioned that there would be nothing new on avenue of champions for two years
because of construction. Once we get more pedestrian scrambles it will make pedestrian traffic
much safer, efficient, and convenient as well as helping sustain the campus. Another effective
way to sustain transportation on campus and improve the overall efficiency is reducing and
limiting the parking passes. This would in return add space to our campus and overall reduce the
constant traffic volume during peak hours. Adding more incentives and benefits to students
through UK transportation is the best way to improve ridership throughout campus. Listening to
what students and staff have to suggest on what they want to see from these types of programs
may be a determining factor on whether they see increased ridership. Taking what makes other
transportation systems good would be a good starting point to improve an already robust unit of
busses and bikes on campus. The sky's the limit for what the potential incentives could be to
improve this program.
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