State College Inner Loop Transportation Network

Overview

State College, Pennsylvania is home to The Pennsylvania State University, one of the largest schools in the country, with its athletics, concerts, and academic events attracting tens of thousands of people to this small town in a single day. The small town is not designed to accommodate that large of a population at once, and with its population continuing to grow, there is constant traffic and congestion surrounding the university. To help improve transportation within State College, officials have discussed implementing a network called the “Inner Loop” for many years, but it has never been fully completed. Our project is to complete the Eastern half of the “Inner Loop” design which would connect the entire system and help relieve some of the congestion within the town’s transportation network.

Objectives

Our group’s objectives were to design an alternative that was actually going to be utilized if it were to be designed as well as mitigating traffic congestion. We prioritized the cost of building the alternatives to make sure it would be cost effective and efficient for the surrounding community.

Approach

– To gather the customer needs and requirements we looked at past traffic analysis data and saw a need for an alternative route during busy travel times throughout the day and year.
– We were able to draw a few different concepts for each route alternative in Civil 3D. We chose the best routes out of our ideas based off of our analysis computations.
– We created everything ourselves within Civil 3D, HCS, and excel calculations.
– We did not have a sponsor, so we did not have to meet with anyone for our project.
– We created Civil 3D files when making our alternative routes. Within this, we created alignment overviews, cross sections, and profile views.
– For our project we created 3 separate alternatives for our project. For each alternative we performed calculations and examinations to determine which was the best choice.
– We performed testing in the ways of calculations when comparing the routes. This proved to show the best option available.
– We validated our routes by performing several excel calculations, including, environmental rankings, pavement designs, final costs, etc.
– Most of our calculations resulted in monetary values that we could sum together to analyze the final cost of each route.

Outcomes

– If our project were to be sponsored, they would be able to profit from this project because the construction costs are limited. The newly constructed route would reroute and disperse traffic and further promote tourism and growth in the State College area.
– Travel times were reduced by a few minutes as a result of this project.
– The project reduced overall traffic rates in the entire State College transportation network.
– This project resulted in the addition of a new approach connecting two already existing roads.
– We do not currently have a sponsor for this project.