U of I F&S Trial Crosswalk between the Business Instructional Facility (BIF) and Wohlers Hall

In recent years, pedestrian safety on-campus has become a growing concern at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I). One such issue was raised by U of I’s College of Business, specifically on the frequency of pedestrians jaywalking between the Business Instructional Facility (BIF) and Wohlers Hall, just south of the intersection at Sixth Street and Gregory Drive. Using funding from the College of Business, U of I’s Facility & Services (F&S) implemented a temporary mid-block crosswalk in the area on September 22, 2014.

In order to assess if this temporary crosswalk should be installed permanently, a survey was created by 2 Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) James Scholars (Sicong Fang and Ethel Liao) with the guidance of U of I F&S employees (Morgan Johnston, Stacey DeLorenzo, and Roland White). The survey collected over 500 electronic responses from the perspectives of pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers, and bus drivers in the affected area for 2 weeks from October 31 - November 14, 2014. Survey participants included U of I students, staff, faculty, and guests; they were contacted via targeted email newsletters (departmental, eweek, F&S, and CUMTD), official U of I social media channels (Facebook and Twitter for F&S, the College of Business, and CUMTD), and on-site surveying with iPads by the LAS James Scholar students. Questions on the survey were based on a 1 to 5 number scale and allowed respondents to explain why they rated each item as they did. Topics covered included how perceptions on safety, convenience, and traffic flow changed upon the temporary crosswalk’s installation; there was also an area for respondents to suggest other problematic transportation spots on-campus and how the process F&S went through for this crosswalk may be improved for future projects. Final analytics on collected data were done by Sicong with the help of the summarization function in Google Forms.