Broadway Corridor Study
Project Overview
What is a corridor study?
A corridor study is a planning project that uses user research to define the relationships between a road and its adjacent land.
For this project, we were assessed the safety, functionality, and aesthetics for a corridor in Knoxville, TN, came up with a list of suggested short term and long term changes for the corridor, and created three design iterations based upon our findings. The design ideas have not been built as of yet because the city first needs to acquire funding for the project.
The Team
Toole Design Group (who I worked for at the time) is a multidisciplinary firm made up of civil engineers, urban planners, and landscape architects.
My Role
Landscape Designer
Responsibilities
My responsibilities for this project included gathering materials for open house and vision workshop, assessing existing conditions, helping with the open house, participating in vision workshop and stakeholder meetings, rendering plans and sections, and creating infographics and icons.
Understanding the User
Review of Existing Plans
We started off our study by reviewing previous plans and studies that intersect with our project site. These plans and studies cover a wide range of topics, including physical infrastructure improvements, urban design, public transit, and multimodal transportation. They are as follows:
Broadway Hall of Fame Intersection Feasibility Study (2005)
Broadway Corridor Enhancement Plan (2015)
Knoxville Bicycle Facilities Plan (2015)
Knoxville Regional Transit Corridor Study (2013)
2040 Long Range Regional Mobility Plan (2013)
Site Walk
Next, we gathered as a team and did a site walk with member of the City of Knoxville. We walked the entire site of our study taking photos and notes of all the problems we were witnessing.
While walking the Broadway Corridor, we discovered a lot of safety issues and felt unsafe ourselves walking so close to the road edge with a large number of fast traveling vehicles and many dangerous intersections with no crosswalks. A lot of the intersections were at a skewed angle or had a steep hill, both of which provided poor visibility for drivers.
Community Engagement
Later that same day, we held a public open house for anyone in the community to come and give us feedback. We had posters all around the room for them to use stickers to vote on their preferences and a large aerial of the site on the table for them to write comments on with sticky notes and sharpies.
Below is a series of infographics I created for this study that summarize our user research results from the open house.
Starting the Design
Visioning Workshop
After collecting user feedback from the community, we conducted an intense one-day ideation visioning workshop. Civil Engineers, Urban Planners, Landscape Architects, and myself took trace paper and roughly sketched out our design ideas on aerials of the site. We then assessed all the ideas together and came up with three main designs.
Visioning Workshop: Three Alternative Designs
Stakeholder Meetings
Following the Visioning Workshop, the project team interviewed the following key stakeholder groups:
Knoxville Fire Department
Knoxville Police Department
TDOT
Knoxville Area Transit
Advisory Committee
Neighborhood Groups
From the stakeholder meetings we learned that the stakeholders greatly preferred a design that included a roundabout. This discovery made total sense to our team as there is a lot of research claiming that roundabouts make for some of the safest intersections.
Guiding Principals
The themes that emerged from the public meetings and workshops shaped the following guiding principles for the Broadway Corridor Study:
Public Presentation of Alternatives: Public Vote
After iterating more on our three alternative designs following the stakeholder meetings, we presented our designs at a public meeting. Meeting attendees overwhelmingly supported the roundabout design shown in Alternative 3.
Refining the Design
Alternative 3 Plan: Before & After
After presenting our designs to the public we started drafting Alternative 3 digitally and adding more detail. Then we colored in the plan (aerial views) and cross sections (horizontal view) and created perspectives (how it would look in person) in Photoshop.
Alternative 3: Perspectives
Below are two perspectives we created of what we envision the Broadway Corridor could look like if our design was built. The perspectives were first drawn in the 3D modeling program Google Sketchup and then brought into Photoshop and enhanced with layers of images.
Accessibility Considerations
Going Forward
What I learned
I learned so much from this project about how to engage with communities and create designs based on feedback from users. Everything we designed was driven by what we learned walking the site and talking to residents of Knoxville.
Next steps
1. Create a phasing plan for the corridor, starting with catalyst projects that can be implemented quickly.
2. Make key partnerships will need to be made, identified, and applied for to leverage existing money for construction funds.
3.Create blueprints with construction details which can be used to build the project.
Thank You!
Thank you for your time reviewing my work on the Broadway Corridor Study. You can find the full Broadway Corridor Study here. If you’d like to connect with me or view more of my work, my contact information is provided below:
Email: caitlinkhan8@gmail.com
Website: caitlinkhan.com
