Civil Engineering Team Garners Award

A team of researchers from the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department won the Transportation Research Board’s 2008 Charley V. Wootan Award for the outstanding paper in the field of policy and organization. The team – comprising associate professor Norman Garrick and graduate students Wesley Marshall and Gilbert Hansen – was honored for their paper “Reassessing On-street Parking,” which was published in the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2046.The paper emerged from their research involving issues related to on-street parking, such as demand, the pedestrian environment, and safety as a function of vehicle speeds.

The research study produced a number of important conclusions, among them:

• Drivers prefer on-street parking spaces versus off-street surface lots and garages,
• On-street parking consumes less than half the land of off-street parking,
• The presence of on-street parking significantly slows vehicular traffic to a speed better suited for pedestrian activities, and
• On-street parking helps create lower-speed streets with the lowest fatal and severe crash rates of any road category in the study, which involved over 250 Connecticut roadway segments.

The team was recognized during the TRB 88^th annual meeting in Washington, DC in January. View the press release here.