Eastern Inner Loop Project – State College, PA

Overview

The Eastern Inner Loop is a roadway alternative that has been proposed for the State College area dating back to the 1940’s. In this project, a roadway was designed that connects the intersections of Park Avenue and University Drive with that of Atherton Street and Blue Course Drive to complete the loop. The need for the proposed alignment arises from the extremely high daily traffic volumes on Atherton Street from the high-value destinations it contains, alleviating heavy congestion in downtown State College as a result of the narrow roadway network, and providing the framework for developing the area as a potential growth region for the University. The proposed alignment can bring about substantial benefits to the State College community.

Objectives

The project objective is to design a roadway alignment alternative to complete the last portion of the Eastern Inner Loop Project. To do this, three alternatives were created and analyzed in order to propose the best alignment choice to maximize benefits to the surrounding community.

Approach

Develop preliminary design concepts of the 3 proposed roadway alternatives:
– Design vertical and horizontal alignments of the alternatives
– Identify the functional class and environmental impacts of each alternative
– Identify the design controls and criteria to be applied to each roadway alternative

Perform analyses and preliminary cost estimations for each alignment:
– Create an environmental impact weighting scale to use in assessing the impacted land for each alignment
– Perform quantitative safety and design consistency analyses using HCS
– Estimate the total construction costs of each alignment
– Identify the cost-benefit ratio of each alignment using the Redbook Wizard

Evaluate and compare all the findings to determine the preferred roadway alignment:
– Compare travel time savings, travel time costs, and land use costs
– Comparison of 85th percentile and design speed ratings and consistencies
– Evaluate existing intersections that each alignment will connect at or determine the additional construction cost for designing an intersection or interchange

Collaborate to find the preferred alignment to implement that has the best cost-benefit ratio and maximizes benefits to the user across multiple categories while minimizing cost

Outcomes

– The implementation of the Blue Course Alternative would have a capital cost to the users of $12,460,919 and total user benefit of $176,866,218, which shows a benefit-cost ratio of 15.194.

– A total of 3,805,052 user hours over the course of 20 years are saved with this alignment. Also, there would be a reduction of 42.7175 total crashes/year, going from 48.5295 crashes/year on the existing route to only 5.812 crashes/year on the proposed alignment. Traffic would be alleviated from surrounding roads with an expected AADT drop from 17,000 vehicles/day to 11,304 vehicles/day.