The most interesting thing about this video is the number of cars that go beyond the crosswalk line. About seven feet behind the striped crosswalk, is the line where cars are supposed to stop. Half the time cars would stop there, and the other half they would come dangerously close to pedestrians.

Neurological and psychological studies have shown that when people drive, the car becomes an extension of themselves. Despite being behind the wheel of a 3,000 pound machine, they inch close to pedestrians about as far as it would be socially acceptable in person. It's one of the dangers of becoming too familiar with driving and unfamiliar with what it's really like to walk around the city.

Remember folks: your car is massive compared to people. Keep your distance.

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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!

Read the rest of this entry →

Yes, comrades, there was once upon a time a plan to develop the area around UNLV to be more friendly to students’ feet. That project was called Midtown UNLV.

I found this out today while lunching with some hip planners from the City of Las Vegas. But some stuff didn’t go through, and that’s what I’m working on finding out.

There isn’t much on their site – just some drawups of the Greenspun Hall and the new student union. Here is the link anway: Midtown UNLV

Yeah, it stings.

That’s the word from PIO Tracy Bower at RTC.

There are plans in the works for ACE Downtown Connector and ACE Express, which has three stops at Durano & US 95, the downtown transportation center, then possibly UNLV,  to connect to the city’s university. With the completion of two studes – UNLV intermodal transit hub and the Maryland Parkway ACE study – it sounds like Clark County is seriously thinking about serving the community and not just the toursists.

I haven’t gotten a hold of either studies yet, the PIOs at RTC are saying they’ll be out soon.

Went around the Maryland Parkway corridor in front of UNLV Sunday, to see what there is to see. What I saw was parking lots! And a new parking garage! Here is the front of the school:

And the new garage:

Peachy keen, the first thing people notice about the university is the impenetrable gravel and concrete moat.

A 2007 survey asked students about parking – only a handful mentioned better alternative transportation. But the questions were very much skewed to get student thinking about how bad parking is.

Instead of asking – how would you PREFER to get to school or WHERE on campus do you frequent the most, they asked “Where would you like better parking?”

The numbers are also highly skewed towards faculty and staff – about 53% faculty and staff in the study. Um, hello? There are almost 27,000 students and only 46% of the respondents were students?

My conclusion – we can’t do anything with this study. The information gleaned can only be used to address faculty and staff parking needs. The university can’t make adequate decisions about parking and transportation policy unless a better sampling is taken.

Secondly – does the university really want to be encased in parking garages and lots? To the outsider, it doesn’t look so much like a university so much as a strip mall. Take a look at this screen shot from a map done by Mark Skinner called Walkable UNLV. Notice all those “P”s for Parking? And that’s not even all of them!

I’m heading down to UNLV on Saturday morning to take photos of the streets surrounding the university for a photoshop project I’m working on similar to Good.is’s Livable Streets challenge.

If you have photos of your own, please submit them via email (akgobrien at gmail dot com) or add them our Flickr group.

If you photoshopped it already, even better because we can feature it in a post!

Cheers

The center of any city is its downtown. Unfortunately for Las Vegas, that downtown is littered with tourists who really don’t care about the Vegas community.

UNLV is a prime target to start growing a more connected city.

The people at the university’s parking services department have been almost irreversibly stigmatized because the student newspaper, The Rebel Yell, attacks them  repeatedly for the of lack of parking spaces.

More parking spaces means more cars, more cars means more gas burning, and more gas burning means terrible air quality and longer, hotter, drier summers.

But let’s not focus on parking, let’s focus on buses.

What would happen then if students were to actually take the bus to school? What would happen if the apartments in the surrounding area were dominated by students? It would create a chain reaction.

More bus lanes, better access and even university run shuttles to neighborhoods within a 2 mile radius could ease up the need for parking, create a real downtown feel and, of course, make UNLV green.

Right now, RTC is conducting a corridor study of Maryland Parkway that could better serve the area by adding a bus-only lane. It’s a fantastic idea. Tracy Bower, public information officer for RTC, said they were working with the university on the study.

I am waiting for Tad McDowell at UNLV’s Parking Services to return a call so we can begin the discussion.