Rice students pitch transportation plans

David Ratnoff and Elisabeth Kalomeris present their transportation plan for the Rice campus to judges at a mini-charrette March 27.

Mini-charrette winner proposes ‘middle loop’ for motor vehicles, would benefit shuttles, pedestrians

What goes around comes around eventually, but some Rice students would like it to come around a little more quickly.

“It” would be the campus shuttle, and its frequency was one of the data points cited by teams who accepted a challenge to revamp campus transportation of all types in a mini-charrette put on by students at the Rice School of Architecture.

Elisabeth Kalomeris describes the winning plan to judges at Brochstein Pavilion.

Three multidisciplinary teams learned what the challenge was on the evening of March 24 and had until midnight March 26 to complete their proposals, a process that mimics real-world pressures for architects. They presented the results of their weekend work March 27 at Brochstein Pavilion, where they described how they would better balance the transportation demands of drivers, pedestrians, cyclists and skateboarders on an expanding campus.

The winning team of psychology policy studies major Elisabeth Kalomeris and history major David Ratnoff, with assistance from architecture major Zach Gwin, determined that the best way to make the inner loop safer would be to close it to most cars. That would require the completion of what they called a “middle loop” that would cut south onto Alumni Drive, roughly follow Main Street, rejoin existing roads near the Founder’s Court parking lot and wind around to a better-connected Campanile Road.

A side benefit, they noted, would be that cars would always be within shouting distance of public parking. Campus shuttles would still be allowed on the inner loop, but their progress would be more efficient without cars in the way, they said.

“We spent most of our time discussing how different stakeholders interact with the existing campus,” they wrote in their project statement. “We considered students who live off-campus, as well as the student who is trying to explore beyond the hedges. We considered faculty, staff and administration who interact with the campus daily, and the first-time visitors for whom (Americans with Disabilities Act) accessibility is their primary concern. Our design approach simplifies access to campus by integrating the needs of these different stakeholders into a cohesive, multimodal transit system.”

The winning plan would send most traffic around a “middle loop” to free up the inner loop for pedestrians, shuttles, cyclists and skateboarders. Click on the image for a larger version.

The students noted the parking lots that separate the academic and residential campus from athletic facilities, including Rice Stadium, and the Moody Center for the Arts make the trek from east to west less appealing. They suggested the construction of “green” walkways that would further integrate the campus.

They said their design “not only changes the way we use campus, but in the long term, alters how we think about campus and its potential growth.”

Another proposal offered suggestions for making bus routes more efficient by adjusting stops and adding bike stations, and a third called for a “medial loop” that would make the campus easier to navigate for cyclists and skateboarders by giving them new and better paths away from motor vehicle traffic.

Juniors Madeleine Pelzel and Andrew Bertics organized the competition. The judges were Lonnie Hodgeboom, director of planning, design and development for the Houston Downtown Management District; Rice architecture and engineering lecturer Christof Spieler; Kevin Kirby, Rice’s vice president for administration; Lisa Lin, transportation demand management program manager at Rice; and Christopher Hight, an associate professor at the Rice School of Architecture.