‘IT’S A PROBLEM’
RPI civil engineering students host open house to discuss Burdett Avenue
Community members, students, parents, and a couple of city employees swung by Troy Middle School after hours Tuesday to look at proposals for Burdett Avenue.
A capstone project for five RPI civil engineering students, the open house gave the stakeholders a chance to provide feedback and the students a chance to take it in. After hearing what the community has to say, mentor and principal planner and engineer at Verity Engineering, Lindsay Zefting said, they’ll create one alternative and hopefully work with the city and schools to make it a reality.
“I’ve worked with the professor for years and wanted to really give the students a real-world experience and Burdett is just, it’s a problem for RPI students, for local students,” Zefting said. “My kids go to School 14, you know, so I see the mess that it is, so I’m kind of mentoring through this real-world process.”
The project focused on just one stretch of Burdett Avenue from Tibbits Avenue to Peoples Avenue, a half-mile stretch with Troy High School, Troy Middle School, and RPI. With school buses, CDTA buses, and cars dropping off and picking up on top of bikes, pedestrians and cars just using it as a throughway or to get to their homes on the street, it’s a traffic jam, Zefting said.
Additionally, when it’s not busy, it’s a speedway as the street is wide and has no speed bumps or dips. In just the last few years, there have been several crashes including one in 2022 where the RPI student later died from her injuries.
“Crossing this avenue has been very harsh on the kids at RPI and the middle school because there’s not like, as you can see, the lane markings (have) wear and tear,” said one of the students Jeffrey Liao. “It’s for the benefit of the community as well as safety for cyclists, pedestrians, students (and) residents.”
“This project specifically is very interesting ‘cause there’s a lot of (differences). It’s essentially two different roads at different times of the day,” added another student Ramond Lin. “I love working on transportation projects like this.”
Starting in January, the students began their research, digging through traffic patterns and reports, talking to stakeholders, and building three alternatives to what the road is now. Each alternative Tuesday had a map of Burdett Avenue with the proposed changes drawn in including computer renderings of what some of them might
A capstone project for five RPI civil engineering students, the open house gave the stakeholders a chance to provide feedback.
look like or photos of real-life implementations of their suggestions.
They included various ways to reduce congestion and keep all users safe ranging from having raised crosswalks to consolidating the two southbound bus stops on the road to re-routing school bus pick-up and drop-off to behind the school. There were also suggestions of shifting parking lot entrances or making Bleeker Avenue (another street connected to Tibbits) a one-way that leads away from Burdett Avenue.
Tuesday night, visitors — who began filling up the room before it even officially began at 6 — could hear the pitch from the students, ask questions, and provide ideas and concerns of their own before voting on each of the proposed changes. At the last station, they voted on all the proposed changes and added additional comments.
“We want to collect their thoughts after we’ve sort of picked their brains at each one,” said Rachel, who was manning the concluding section. “All five of the members of the team use Burdett to get to class. We drive on it to get to the grocery store and everything so we’re all as equally frustrated as the community.”
It was nice to have a tangible example that they could survey themselves, she added, rather than try to imagine in their heads, which Zefting said she had for her RPI capstone. Each student had a role, but the three alternatives were collaborative and had some overlapping proposals.
The maps were thoroughly detailed including important factors like how many feet would need to be added to create a two-way bike lane. Some of the maps also hyper-focused on different problems like Alternative 2 which was more concerned with pedestrian and biker safety.
“We just kept brainstorming,” said Mariam Alyassin, who called their group the “lucky few” brought on board. “We listened to our stakeholders, we got their feedback and all these alternatives sort of bring those results home and we tried to compile them into cohesive alternatives.”
It allowed them to be embedded in the community, several students said, and the open house emulated what it might be like for them to present proposals in their upcoming professional lives. Myany of them are entering into related fields or already have jobs lined up with the State Department for similar work.
“It’s a lot more interesting I feel than working on just like a fictional building site,” said Mark De Paula. “I feel like it’s more work, but I enjoy it a lot more because it has a very real result.
“Well, both a real area and a real result,” he continued. “Hopefully.”