LAKEWOOD —The city of Lakewood has been working to improve pedestrian access across the city, especially since the new West Line light rail arrived in April 2013.
The latest project partners with graduate students from the University of Colorado Denver to identify missing links in the network of sidewalks and trails.
“Our citizens have been asking for more and more sidewalks,” said principal civil engineer Vincent Casteel. “We can hardly get sidewalks built before we have people walking on them.”
The collaboration is part of Hometown Colorado, and it’s a way for students to apply what they learn in class to real-world problems.
Along the way, the city gets some needed data to inform its decisions.
“It’s really filling in a lot of gaps in terms of the information that the city has about itself, so it should be very helpful for Lakewood,” said Scott Carman, an instructor in the College of Architecture and Planning who is teaching the Introduction to Geographic Information Systems class. “It’s going to help the city better understand its infrastructure, especially in terms of the pedestrian environment.”
The end goal for the students is to be able to make recommendations to the city on how to improve walkability and accessibility to the light rail stations.
To do that, students are collecting data about the city’s current walking paths to light-rail stations using a geographic information systems application called GIS Cloud.
The app allows student to pinpoint curb cuts, street lights and street signs.
The 18-person class is split up into three-person teams, with each team working on a different light-rail station.
Student Carolyn Hagele is documenting the area around the Federal Center station and the Union Boulevard corridor.
When she wants to document a specific curb cut that may need improvement — such as a crosswalk lacking handicap access — she can input the location and information into the app, which in turn sends it to her desktop computer.
“The school has a great program. We’re fortunate to be able to learn GIS technology because it can be used on a lot of larger scale projects,” Hagele said.
The students are in the planning and research phase, which includes analyzing the walking paths, bike paths, curb cuts, pedestrian lighting, bike racks, crosswalk signals and other factors. The students are also in touch with city officials to take into account what the city wants implemented.
Students will hand in their final analyses and recommendations at the conclusion of the class in January.
Carman hopes the data will assist the city in focusing on the important topic of walkability.
“Walking is a much healthier activity than sitting in your car all day,” said Carman. “There have been a lot of studies that correlated walkability to public health and obesity rates. So a lot of cities across the country are moving in the direction of becoming more walkable, and Lakewood is one of them.”
Casteel hopes the student project and implementation of recommendations will move the city towards its ultimate goal:
“We’re trying to get people out of their cars and walking around to make our citizens healthier and happier.”
Catherine Elsby: celsby@denverpost.com
