Daily Pioneer News

From left to right: Brad Blum, Gunther Kochan and Matt Hull take a break from their research to improve traffic flow around the Platteville schools.

PLATTEVILLE - Improving the level of safety by reducing the amount of traffic flow around the Platteville High School and Platteville Middle School is the goal for the senior design team from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

The design team consists of three students graduating in December who are each majoring in civil engineering with an emphasis in transportation engineering. The three students are Matt Hull, originally from Waupun; Brad Blum, originally from Cross Plains; and Gunther Kochan, originally from Madison.

The team is working alongside members of the Grant County Safe Communities Coalition to assist in the project by developing a traffic feasibility study to determine and analyze the level of safety around the middle and high schools.

Currently the traffic flow in the entire area concerning the two schools is congested, causing school buses to be delayed and leaving students in situations that could be improved.

The team has conducted extensive research regarding the project including various traffic studies in specified topics such as volume, speed, pedestrians and turning movement. A community and parent survey has also been distributed to increase knowledge regarding the safety issues and practical solutions. Following the collection of information, the team has performed data analysis to determine different resolutions to the current safety issues.

Some of the resolutions discovered by the group through their research include installing traffic signals at intersections that are currently handling large volumes of traffic; reapplying traffic lines on certain highways to better direct traffic flow and turn lanes; and change specific two-way streets into one-way streets to develop a circular flow of traffic between the two school areas.

The next obstacle for the group to overcome is to provide a cost estimate of their various resolutions, while determining and weighing the practicality of implementing them. Following this step, the group will prepare a proposal depicting their solutions that will be presented to the Grant County Safe Communities Coalition.

Throughout the progress on their design project, the team feels they have gained an increasing knowledge of traffic engineering. Learning to work with limited options such as budget, community and location constraints has also been a challenge the team has overcome. Overall, the team feels this project has been very beneficial and has offered them hands-on fieldwork that will aid them in their respective fields of study following graduation.

Assisting and advising the team throughout the stages of their project has been Dr. Tom Nelson, associate professor in construction engineering and Dr. Sam Owusu-Ababio, assistant professor in transportation engineering.