Eastern Inner Loop Design Project

Overview

The State College region has been experiencing a population growth that has caused the area to experience traffic issues and roadway congestion. The Eastern Inner Loop roadway has been proposed to the State College area dating back to the 1940’s. This newly designed roadway would eliminate the traffic congestion and possibly shorten travel time.

Objectives

Our objective was to design two alternatives, analyze the benefits of each, and choose the best design alternative to solve the traffic issues to benefit the surrounding community.

Approach

-Develop preliminary design concepts of the two proposed roadway alternatives.

-Identify functional classification to determine type of roadway.

-Develop design controls and criteria for each alternative.

-Design vertical and horizontal alignments of the alternatives.

-Identify environmental impacts of each alternative.

-Create environmental inventory and ranking to assess the impacted land.

-Perform safety and design consistency analyses.

-Estimate the total construction cost based on earthwork, land acquisition, crash costs, and estimated pavement cost.

-Evaluate and compare findings to determine a preferred alternative.

-Evaluate existing intersections and design a new intersection.

-Design pavement type, thickness, and determine the design life.

-Perform final cost estimation of completed roadway.

-Perform benefit-cost analysis and compare time saving and safety benefits to the construction cost.

Outcomes

-The Blue Course Drive alignment was determined to be the preferred alternative.

-Total estimated construction cost is $3,608,513.46 and the total project cost is $5,676,679.40.

-There is a crash reduction of 46.04 crashes per year from the existing roadway network to our newly designed alternative.

-Traffic would be alleviated from the surrounding roads with the existing AADT of 17,000 vehicles/day dropping down to 11,304 vehicles/day.