- February 11th, 2007, 9:24 am
#59964
From Sunday's fishwrap:
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Ron Brown and Matt Busse
The News & Advance
February 11, 2007
"I thought I was going to get run over!”
That’s what one in five Liberty University students in a recent survey about campus transportation had to say about crossing Wards Road on foot.
Securing safe passage for those students - and the rest of the LU campus community - to the growing number of stores lining Lynchburg’s major retail corridor has become a key focus of the university.
Wards Road is ground zero in LU’s population boom. It’s also the residence of choice for major retailers eager to cash in on the instant clientele LU creates.
How to connect those two dots has become a matter of some debate as LU works toward a comprehensive mobility plan to streamline bus, automobile and pedestrian traffic on campus.
The outcome is important to the campus as well as the city.
For LU, getting a handle on traffic issues is becoming urgent. The campus’ current daily population - including faculty, staff and students - is about 12,000 people. The university projects that by the year 2020, that total could hover at the 30,000 mark.
“Our bus service and pedestrian tunnels that work great now may become completely inadequate when we reach 30,000 people,” said LU’s vice chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr.
For the city, and especially its businesses, providing the means for LU students and staff to travel off campus easily would boost sales. The city and the school also have safety concerns for the growing amount of pedestrian traffic.
Getting LU students across Wards Road is one of the top priorities. It currently has no sidewalks or crosswalks to accommodate the hundreds of students who cross each day to shop and eat.
City officials are considering adding crosswalks and pedestrian signals at the newest Wal-Mart entrance. But city traffic engineer Gerry Harter said there are concerns about whether such at-grade crossings alone can prevent a pedestrian accident on the heavily traveled highway.
Crosswalks, Harter said, can lull pedestrians into a false sense of security. Because they are marked with signs and painted lines, pedestrians sometimes assume drivers are watching out for them, he said.
“It just takes a while for people to realize, ‘Oh, wait, there are pedestrians here, I’ve got to stop.’ The crosswalk is really more for the driver than the pedestrian,” Harter said.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, LU’s chancellor, said he thinks a tunnel under Wards Road may provide the solution. He estimates it would cost about $250,000.
“We met with city officials in December and asked them for improvements to pedestrian facilities on Wards Road,” Falwell Jr. said. “Now, it’s starting to come together in our minds what those pedestrian facilities need to look like. With a tunnel, we think pedestrians could walk within the shopping centers and not be walking along Wards Road.”
LU’s students already use a similar pedestrian tunnel to get from the school’s main campus to residence halls on the opposite side of U.S. 460. That tunnel, which is about four times longer, cost about $1 million.
“One day we’ll have 100 dorms over there,” Falwell Sr. said. “The tunnel will serve all of them.”
There may be federal money available for making pedestrian safety improvements.
A case in point: efforts by the state Department of Transportation and the city to ensure pedestrian safety on Liberty Mountain Drive, where 30 residence halls have sprung up in recent years.
City officials have told Falwell Jr. that sidewalks along Liberty Mountain Drive will be a priority as the city considers a new conditional use permit for LU when the school reaches 10,000 residential students later this year.
“We just recently had a meeting with VDOT and came up with a plan to build a temporary walkway from Campus East across the existing U.S. 460 bridge,” Falwell Jr. said.
That walkway initially would have concrete barriers to separate pedestrians from automobile traffic.
VDOT is applying for federal funds to put fencing along the side of the bridge to keep students from falling off or throwing objects at oncoming traffic.
“That federal grant would also cover part of the cost of curb and guttering on Liberty Mountain Drive,” Falwell Jr. said. “Those sidewalks and improvements to the U.S. 460 bridge will pretty much finish what we need to have pretty good pedestrian mobility on campus.”
The mobility from campus to Wards Road is a separate issue, Falwell Jr. said.In recent years, concerns about pedestrian traffic on Wards Road have been overshadowed by the challenges of managing vehicle traffic, said Lynchburg City Councilman Jeff Helgeson.
Wards Road is in Ward III, which Helgeson represents.
Residents complain more often about vehicle traffic than pedestrian accommodations, and cars greatly outnumber pedestrians on Wards Road, he said.
With the main focus on moving vehicles, walking across and along Wards Road is risky, Helgeson said. The road has many entrances, exits and stoplights.
“That’s a lot of cars coming from all sorts of places,” he said.
Some pedestrian improvements would require help from the area’s business community.
For example, a pedestrian-friendly route between Best Buy and Wal-Mart would be entirely on privately owned land, Harter said.
“As a city, we can strongly recommend sidewalks … but we can’t make them put a sidewalk everywhere we think it’s wanted,” Harter said.
Building sidewalks up and down Wards Road would require replacing drainage ditches with a curb-and-gutter system, costing millions of dollars, Harter said.
“Anything is possible with the right amount of money,” he said.
Helgeson said he favors shifting some of the city’s money now being invested in other projects, such as efforts to revitalize downtown businesses, to improving Wards Road.
“You’ve only got so much money,” he said.
In recent years, Lynchburg has invested tens of millions of dollars downtown in efforts to attract businesses and visitors.
That’s a small amount compared to how much private businesses have invested, Helgeson said.
Falwell Jr. said Wards Road should be at the top of the city’s list of places to improve because of the amount of traffic and taxes generated there.
“I don’t think any other street generates as much sales tax revenue as Wards Road,” Falwell Jr. said. “I think the city needs to acknowledge that in its spending decisions, when it decides where to build sidewalks and improve roads.”
Richard Martin, LU’s director of financial research and analysis, said giving students safer passage across Wards Road could pump up the volume of business.
“If we make it easier to get over there, there will be a positive residual effect in terms of business and dollars spent,” he said.
One area of possible business growth could be a modified meal plan for LU students.
The university is toying with the idea of engaging local restaurants to help supplement on-campus food services by either giving students discounts or honoring a prepaid meal card. The university would pay the restaurants directly for meals furnished.
“It helps Liberty if we don’t have to build so many cafeterias,” Falwell Jr. said.
He said the university has made several good faith investments to reduce the mix of pedestrian and automobile traffic on Wards Road.
Just last month, the school started providing a shuttle service from the campus to Wards Road businesses.
LU may soon enter into an agreement for off-campus service with the Greater Lynchburg Transit Company.
GLTC is already providing on-campus bus service. City and university officials are discussing whether to add loops that would include Wards Road, River Ridge mall and the Candlers Station shopping center.
Meanwhile, the school is planning two vehicular tunnels under railroad tracks near the intersection of Wards Road and Harvard Street to give buses and other vehicles more direct and safer access to Wards Road.
The school is also planning a pedestrian tunnel to keep students from having to cross the railroad tracks on their way to and from Wards Road businesses.
“All we can do is take care of our side of it,” Falwell Jr. said. “That’s what we’ve done with the tunnels we’ve proposed and the shuttles we’ve helped to initiate. We think it is good for the city for people to walk instead of drive. It keeps traffic off the road. It is a lot more expensive to accommodate motor vehicle traffic than it is pedestrians.”
Contact Ron Brown at (434) 385-5542 or rbrown@newsadvance.com. Contact Matt Busse at (434) 385-5533 or mbusse@newsadvance.com.
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