GAI Consultants honored for traffic study in busy thoroughfare

GAI Consultants (GAI) and fellow team members recently attended the 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania Annual Commonwealth Awards to receive an award for the Oakland/Carnegie Mellon University Pedestrian Safety and Mobility Study project in Pittsburgh, PA, which was recently selected as a winner of the 2012 “Community Transportation Excellence Award.”

“This project represents a paradigm shift in thinking,” states GAI Senior Engineering Manager John Wojtyna, P.E. “For the first time human beings take top priority over machines in the overall movement of pedestrians, bicyclists, and other vehicles in a busy traffic corridor.”

GAI Consultants provided consulting services to the Oakland Transportation Management Association (OTMA) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for a pedestrian safety and mobility study funded through the Pennsylvania Community Transportation Initiative (PCTI). The Oakland community has the highest concentration of academic and medical institutions in the region and state, with a daytime population of over 100,000 workers, students, and visitors mingling with 60,000 automobiles that use two main arterials.

GAI was retained to review and analyze accident data, inventory University parking, document needs, identify campus destinations and bike/pedestrian corridors, and gather data on pedestrian and cyclist movement. GAI developed design concepts for potential street configurations that maximize safety and access for pedestrians.

This project, completed in December 2010, is the first step in ensuring greater safety for the students, workers, and visitors, as well as the numerous drivers that travel through Oakland daily. The project also creates a plan to increase multi-modal access to this high-traffic area, which will encourage use, development, and future investment in the Oakland area.

GAI is an 850-person, employee-owned, multidiscipline engineering and environmental consulting firm serving clients worldwide in the energy, transportation, real estate, water, municipal, government, and industrial markets from U.S. offices throughout the Northeast, Midwest, and Southeast. For more information, visit www.gaiconsultants.com.