UNLV Transit Hub Study Part 1

There’s no question that a lot of people live and work around UNLV. Looking at the numbers of the RTC’s study, without a doubt this is a busy core. And it’s not just people driving around, it’s also people walking around, biking around, and getting off in front of the university.

Students commuting to UNLV tend to live to the southeast stretching out to the 215 South. It’s a wonder then why there hasn’t been more development transportation wise in this direction. There is 200 space Park & Ride lot just south of the airport, but that’s already within five miles of the university. And we all know how long it takes the buses to travel five miles (link).

Those are all interesting facts, but the success of the proposed Transit Hub, wherever it shall fall, is the implementation of the Maryland Parkway BRT plus other Park & Ride facilities in the southeast. In another study, the Mission Group proposed this layout for the BRT and Park & Ride facilities (from the Fixed-Guideway Transit for the Las Vegas Region Presentation) :

ACE BRT plan

(Interestingly, this study recommended a light rail system but the RTC went with bus rapid transit instead because of price concerns. For an awesome analysis of BRT versus Light Rail, see Yuri Popov’s, physics professor at University of Michigan, post.)

And of course, the success of both the Transit Hub and BRT line depend upon a revitalization of the corridor – i.e. Midtown UNLV. But with the dissolution of the Clark County Redevelopment Agency, everything is very much up in the air.

The next stop is the Maryland Parkway BRT study. Please forgive the delays, but you see, I am but one person reading through thousands of pages.

Proposed Multimodal Station at UNLV

So I got my extraordinarily tiny hands on a copy of the Regional Transportation Committee and UNLV “Multimodal Transit Hub” study commissioned in 2007 and finished this June.

I’m 20 pages in and have already discovered a wealth of information I thought I’d have to calculate myself (which involved standing by each bus stop by UNLV counting how many people got off and on during peak hours, i.e. the hottest frigging time of the day). Yay for not doing extra work!

As I chronicled in an earlier post, the study proposed five different sites around campus where RTC would send its buses. These sites haven’t changed in the final report. And of course, they failed to serve the poor science, engineering and fine arts students at the north-most end of campus. Sorry nerds!

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Today we have a guest blog post from the theoretical physicist over at Gravity and Levity. Please show him some love with some comments!

Being stuck in traffic is frustrating in a way that few other things are.  Something about the helplessness of it makes us extremely irritable, and we become inclined to think that the people around us are idiots.  The guy who just cut you off, the lady talking on her cell phone with her blinker left on, the construction workers standing around and looking at a hole in the ground instead of actually fixing the road.  Everyone seems incompetent and unintelligent when you’re stuck in traffic.

Not uncommonly, this line of thinking extends to the people that decided how and where to build the roads.  Their (lack of) planning can seem like pure idiocy, and the solution for fixing the terrible gridlock can seem painfully obvious.

I understand this type of thinking all too well.  My very first job was in the heart of Washington DC, which meant that I spent about an hour and a half stuck in traffic every day.  And during that time I thought about traffic, how terrible it was, and how it should be a solved problem by now.  It seemed to me that after decades of intense mathematical research and super-powered computer simulations we should understand traffic.  After all, we know where people live, where they work, and when they work.  Why can’t we “solve” for the most efficient pattern of roads and intersections?  Why do the world’s most modern cities still suffer from terrible gridlock?

During the eight years since then, I have thought off and on about traffic from a scientific perspective.  And the more I think/read/hear about it, the more difficult it seems to understand.  In this post, I’ll give a few reasons for our continued inability to “figure out” traffic patterns.

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Update: From Allison Blankenship, PIO:

The RTC’s UNLV Multi-Modal Transit Hub Feasibility Study is near completion and we expect the study findings to be presented to the RTC Board in the next month or so. At this point, funding for the project is not secured.

Board meetings are on the second Thursday of the month at 8:45 a.m. Please attend if you think this study is important. I’ll be sending out reminders on here and via Facebook. Friend us to keep apprised of the situation.

Many local public institutions suffer from lack of visibility. It may, in small part, be due to lack of will to really inform. Or lack of people to inform. Or it may be that all the news happens in committee meetings and not on Facebook. Whatever it is, I’m starting up a new series “Stuff No One Really Advertises” to expose those things which go completely under the radar of the UNLV community, of course with the bent on mobility and livable streets (someone help me find a sexier name for this?).

Today, while doing some shallow digging on RTC’s website, I found a study done in March 2008 on possible transit hubs around campus.

Yes, UNLV and RTC want(ed?) to partner up to give students, faculty and staff better access to buses, bike paths, pedestrian walkways and car traffic. I don’t know about the last one because it seems to be in total contradiction to the other three, but ok.

There are five “alternate sites” where this could happen, in which I respond – why not build all five? These are indicated in two maps showing where some bus stops could be placed.

Stop #1: By the Red Lot, home of the soon to be built parking garage in front of Thomas and Mack.
Stop #2: By the bookstore, urban affairs college and student union.
Stop #3: White Lot, or as students like it call it BFE.
Stop #4: Free lot, again BFE.
Stop #5: UNLV entrance (where Frazier hall used to be) and Ham Fine Arts.

Here’s a map to help you visualize, click on the highlighted areas to get more information:

View Transit Hubs around UNLV? in a larger map
(For some reason its showing the entire US. Please keep zooming in.)

What became of this, I can only assume is another study – the Maryland Parkway corridor study which is evaluating the street for a possible bus rapid transit line.

What will happen to UNLV as a transit hub, though?

It’s been awhile, but I’ve been working hard to consolidate a bunch of information for you all. Here are some motion charts, just because I’m in a motion chart mood, of bus ridership and traffic accidents around the UNLV campus.

Here is a chart showing the ridership increase from 2004 to 2008 on the three bus lines surrounding the university. Just hit play!

(Change the color, size, x and y axes!)

Although ridership has increased, it’s also important to note that the population has increased too. What I’m hoping to do over the summer is do a “deep dive” into the transportation habits of the Maryland Parkway community (please don’t doubt that there is one). I’ll be looking more closely at how students, faculty and staff at UNLV use the bus (if at all).

This chart of traffic accidents from 2004-2008 at five intersections surrounding UNLV comes after serious re-engineering. There was a lot of data and my computer screen is tiny!

There are a lot of variables to play with here. I suggest playing with it to glean the info you want. You change the color of the bubbles, the size of the bubbles, and the x and y axes. The variables are: number of accidents, vehicles involved, fatalities and injuries.

Tell me what interesting things you discover in the comments!