Home » UK Alumni Drive upgrade near stadium wins national engineering award

UK Alumni Drive upgrade near stadium wins national engineering award

AlumniDrive
Alumni Drive now includes a roundabout near the New CWS.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 29, 2016) — The University of Kentucky’s Alumni Drive Improvement Project completed in August of 2015 was awarded an American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) Kentucky Engineering Excellence Grand Award and a National ACEC Engineering Excellence Recognition Award.

The project — overseen by UK’s Capital Project Management Department — reconstructed 1.4 miles of urban roadway at the southern entrance of UK, creating a transition between the natural environment of The Arboretum and a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) water control project to the south with UK sports facilities to the north.

The design used roadway geometrics to help manage speed along the corridor which included two roundabouts.

Providing access to Commonwealth Stadium and The Arboretum, Alumni Drive was reconstructed in 16 weeks — opening one day earlier than scheduled — while maintaining access to adjacent construction, the Child Development Center of the Bluegrass, as well as housing and parking facilities.

The project included complete pavement replacement and expansion of the existing two-lane roadway to safely accommodate pedestrians, bicyclists and 19,000 vehicles daily. The green roadway was designed in just three months and was widened to include bicycle lanes, a non-mountable median, a multi-use trail and LED street lights.

Two existing stop-controlled intersections were converted to roundabouts, increasing efficiency and reducing vehicle emissions. A specialized design feature allows bicyclists to either merge into traffic or use a slip lane to join the multi-use trail to traverse the roundabouts.