Tight Spaces, Smart Places: Reimagining Urban School Transportation
Insight Highlights:
- Urban schools often require more careful transportation planning due to limited space
- This post covers several methods and factors Gorove Slade reviews when assisting K -12 schools in urban locations.
- This includes insights for transportation planners, school administrators, and K-12 school architects
For most school projects in the suburbs and rural areas, transportation planning is simple – build a lot of parking, add a separate school bus facility with lots of space, and then finish it with a parent pick-up/drop-off zone. However, in urban school sites, where space is at a premium, compromises have to be made, and right sizing the transportation infrastructure is essential. Otherwise, precious space that could be dedicated to fields, playgrounds, and green space ends up as asphalt used for 30 minutes twice daily.
Additionally, urban schools tend to have high percentages of students walking, and focusing on parking and parent pick-up/drop-off can conflict with walking routes, creating unsafe and inefficient uses of space. The following are three strategies Gorove Slade deploys when working in urban schools:
Minimize the Amount of Parking
Matching the parking supply to parking demand at an urban school project can be difficult. This is because the demand varies greatly and is influenced by several factors, such as (1) the student/teacher ratio, (2) amount of non-teacher (administrative) staff, and (3) the commuting mode split of the school (i.e., how many teachers take transit, walk, bike, or don’t drive alone), and (4) for high schools, the policies allowing students to drive and park.
Over the years, Gorove Slade has collected parking demand data for a number of schools. As expected, the results vary, with larger schools tending to have fewer cars parked per student and private schools having higher parking demand. Private high schools in particular have a higher student parking demand than public high schools of similar size. We recommend thoroughly reviewing staff projections and commuting tendencies while developing a demand estimate to help plan how to accommodate demand.
With a demand estimate in hand, the next step is determining how to accommodate it, whether to build enough parking on-site or use off-site options. Often, in urban locations, there are several options off-site, including curbside on-street parking and off-site parking lots that aren’t used during the day; a common source of shared parking for schools is adjacent churches. The potential need to change the signing for on-street spaces and get written agreements with adjacent property owners to use their parking is included in evaluating off-site parking sources.
The following chart summarizes Gorove Slade’s approach to school parking supply and demand analyses:
Gorove Slade’s approach to school parking supply and demand analyses
Other factors to consider in parking supply are visitor and event parking. For visitor parking, our general approach on urban sites is to find a shared resource, for example, space in the pick-up/drop-off area that can be reserved for visitor parking between morning arrival and afternoon dismissal. Parking demand for events, such as back-to-school nights, is atypical, and it is not practical to build enough parking to accommodate atypical demand for a handful of days a year (at most). Instead, we try to accommodate event parking on shared resources on and off-site, including on-street parking and adjacent parking lots.
Minimize Room Dedicated to School Buses
The largest factor in how much room school buses take on a school site is not where they stop, the sidewalks and boarding/alighting space students need, but how they turn around. There are three ways to handle school buses, with their main differentiation being: (1) all the bus turns happen on site, (2) part of the bus turns happen on site, and (3) none of the bus turns happen on site. These three archetypes are shown in the diagram below: loops, pull-throughs, and curbside.
The three archetypes on how to handle bus turns on a school site
The main tradeoff between these three types is control versus conflict. Control refers to how much of the facility is within the control of the school itself – the ability to control who enters the facility, how it is designed, and what happens to it outside of arrival and dismissal. For example, a ‘loop’ configuration provides the most control, such as the ability to use it for fleet storage. Meanwhile, the facilities that occupy the least space have the most conflicts. Curbside solutions can conflict with walking routes, pick-up/drop-off facilities, and non-school traffic.
The overall transportation plan for the school needs to minimize conflicts between vehicular modes and walking routes, incorporating careful consideration of what doors walking students and school bus riders are using and how those routes overlap with vehicle/bus traffic. The goal is to emphasize walking and busing to school over being dropped off and picked up via car.
Try to Get Staff and Students Out of Cars
Finally, urban schools can succeed more with programs targeted at getting staff, teachers, and students to use non-vehicular modes of travel, or at least not to drive alone. This includes infrastructure and operational measures.
When planning a school project, a review of non-vehicular infrastructure is essential, as is prioritizing modes. The student pick-up/drop-off area shouldn’t be emphasized over walking routes, biking routes, or school bus boarding/alighting. Those modes should receive priority. For new and existing school sites, a thorough review of walking and biking routes surrounding the site can reveal many opportunities to upgrade facilities, including exploring changing traffic control devices (e.g., installing all-way stop locations to aid in pedestrian crossings).
Operational measures to reduce vehicular demand, generally referred to as Transportation Demand Management (TDM), can also be applied at schools, although in a much different way than traditional land uses for commuters (e.g., residential or office). School employees often have different hours than many TDM services, sometimes must travel long distances, and are often asked to shuttle materials between locations. Because of this, we’ve seen staff carpooling as often the most successful way to reduce staff vehicular travel demand.
Traditional travel demand measures may not apply well to students, who generate most of the vehicular travel demand at schools (from pick-up/drop-off). Some jurisdictions offer free public transit to students, which can be successful, especially with older students. Otherwise, many traditional TDM strategies, such as financial incentives, don’t work either (such as parking charges). Instead, correlating alternative modes to sustainability goals and having contests to see which classrooms/homerooms can walk or bike to school the most during a month can make progress. Elementary schools can also include bike safety and education classes in their P.E. curriculum.
Carpool spaces painted by students at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School in Alexandria, VA
Urban school transportation planning requires a delicate balance of competing priorities – maximizing educational space while providing necessary access, ensuring safety for all travel modes, and promoting sustainable transportation choices. Gorove Slade’s experience has given us keen insights into handling these aspects and more on urban K-12 schools.
Through careful analysis of parking demands, creative solutions for bus operations, and targeted programs to encourage alternative transportation, schools, planners, and engineers can collaborate to create efficient systems that serve their campuses well. Connect with a member of our team to learn how we can help your school create a transportation plan that works for everyone – students, staff, and the surrounding community.
Tollbooth-style PUDO
Scramble-style PUDO
A scramble-style PUDO refers to when some (or all) students are being dropped off or picked up on the street, not an adjacent sidewalk, and walking between cars. For scrambles, some cars drive into a designated area, and then they all stop and don’t move again until all students arrive safely at the school or in their car at dismissal. Scrambles are often used during dismissal for schools with limited sidewalks since a scramble allows for more cars to load simultaneously.
Scramble-style PUDO
When helping plan a school, what does Gorove Slade recommend? In short, all of them. Our recommendation is to design a PUDO facility that can be flexible and work for several operational styles. Once up and running, the staff and teachers can try several and see what works best. The goal is to give them the tools they need to find the best solution.
An example is the new Cardinal Elementary School in Arlington, VA. We recommended a flexible system with ample sidewalks and a bypass lane, and once it was up and running, the facility operated a bit differently than planned. At dismissal, teachers split the facility in two, with two pick-up waiting spots – one for younger grades closer to the school and one for older ones further away. This allowed for quicker matching at dismissal times.
Afternoon pick-up at Cardinal Elementary School
PUDO Analysis
Gorove Slade handles the analysis of PUDO facilities in several ways. They are inherently tricky to analyze because some operational details are challenging to model, and the significant demand is very sensitive to variables leading to large ranges of results.
Here are three ways we approach analyzing PUDO:
Queuing Analysis/Equations
One method is to use classic queuing equations, which transportation engineers have used for decades for toll booths. They are based on three factors: the arrival rate of cars, the number of booths, and the processing speed of the toll. All three of these factors correspond to PUDO facilities.
Even so, queuing equations often fail to get accurate results for PUDO facilities. For example, we were working for a private school with a notorious PUDO problem at dismissal, so we went to the field and measured the arrival rate of cars, the number of vehicles that could load simultaneously, and the average time for each pick-up. We then entered that information into our queuing models, which then told us the queue should be negative, or in other words, there shouldn’t be a queue at all, as the car arrival rate was less than the overall number of cars that could be processed.
Subsequently, we returned to our observation notes and video. We realized the longest queue in the field was when dismissal began and that our model was correct in that the queue was being processed faster than additional cars arrived. Parents and guardians arrived so early that they stacked up well beyond the school property, but once dismissal started, the queue only got shorter as more cars showed up.
The lesson we learned here is that there are more factors in the queuing analysis than just the traditional three and that arrival rates are not random.
Comparable Analysis
A common transportation engineering practice is to study comparable locations, and sometimes, that works well for PUDO facilities, especially when queuing equations don’t work as described above. We’ve taken max queue data at several private and public schools. We can try to match the car length per student ratio from a site comparable to the one we’re working on, given the design and operational elements of their PUDO.
There are two issues with using comparable data. The first one is that there’s an extensive range of data, so using our observed data leads to a max queue range of 0.10 to 0.20 cars per student being picked up. The wide range is due to how well the PUDO processes traffic and the starting queue length. To use these ratios, you need to estimate how well the PUDO will operate within this range.
But more importantly, our observations found some schools with a max queue under the 0.10 cars per student range during dismissal. This wasn’t because they had fewer cars picking up students; it was because the cars weren’t all in the same place. For example, the school we observed once had around 25 to 30 cars picking up simultaneously, but only six were at the official pick-up spot at the front door. The others were in the parking lot or curbside in several locations. So, when planning PUDO facilities, the ability of parents to use informal locations near the school can be a huge factor in the max queues and overall PUDO operations.
VISSIM Modeling
When something other than engineering judgment combined with the two analyses stiles above is desired, we turn to detailed traffic models using the VISSIM software platform. VISSIM models are highly detailed and can account for things like starting queues and varying arrival rates. The main drawback is that they require more time and resources to assemble, and in the end, they still can’t arrive at a perfect representation of a PUDO since human behavior is always a factor.
Thoughtful design and operations can dramatically improve the pick-up and drop-off process. Whether planning a brand new PUDO experience or improving existing operations, the principles and methods discussed here provide a framework for tackling one of the most persistent logistical challenges for administrators and parents alike. By considering key factors like demand patterns, operational strategies, and facility types, schools can create systems that minimize queuing, reduce neighborhood impacts, and make the beginning and end of the school day better for all.
