Dismount zones and shared paths on Cut increase safety

A biker and a walker use Carnegie Mellon’s newly designated shared traffic path. **Arden Ryan/** *News Editor*

On August 12, new campus “dismount zones” were established, marking select paths around the Cut as places where people on bikes, scooters, and skateboards must dismount their vehicles and walk from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays.

Alongside the creation of the dismount zones, other paths around the Cut feature a new green stencil stripe. These were designated as shared walking/ riding paths, where anyone could travel using an assistive device, on a personal vehicle, or on foot.

The dismount zones and shared paths were created by Carnegie Mellon’s Facilities, Infrastructure, and Risk Management (FIRM) department which includes Transportation Services. Planning the zones began about a year ago in response to increased vehicle use on campus paths.

“This is a good problem to have because it means we’re leveraging alternative forms of transportation and reducing our environmental impact, but it also increases risk on the shared paths,” Daryl Weinert, Vice President of Operations for FIRM, told The Tartan.

Maureen Dasey-Morales, Associate Vice President for Community Health and Well-Being, reiterated this point, saying, “Our offices periodically see injuries occurring from the use of wheeled vehicles, like scooters and bicycles, which we’d like to prevent as much as possible.”

Encouraging people to walk and ride bikes leads to beneficial exercise, Dasey-Morales said, but these activities should not become dangerous if put in proximity to each other. The movement of people around campus paths had to be reimagined.

To make paths safer, there were multiple options that the university could choose from. One option was making the Cut completely pedestrian-only.

“We felt that was an unfair, one-sided solution,” said Don Coffelt, Associate Vice President for Facilities Management, Campus Services and Enterprise Space Strategy. Instead, FIRM focused on particularly dangerous and high-traffic areas of the Cut and worked on how to make them safer.

Riders must dismount and walk their vehicles outside of the share riding and walking path. **Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon**

Areas targeted for traffic control included the covered pathways outside of Purnell and the Cohon University Center (CUC), the Merson Courtyard outside the CUC, and the diagonal paths in front of the Fence. These are where the dismount zones were chosen to be placed.

It was also important to FIRM that people on vehicles had a way to get through the Cut quickly without stopping to dismount. Coffelt explained that they did not have the infrastructure yet to create a two-way bike lane on the sidewalk.

The team thought through many possible locations and decided to make the path that is parallel to the tennis courts and the open path outside the CUC the shared use areas. This is the same route as a dedicated bike lane proposed in Carnegie Mellon’s 2022 Institutional Master Plan, “which confirmed for us that both opportunities to look at the same issue were evaluated with the same level of thought and care, and arrived at the same conclusion,” Coffelt said.

Even though the zones have been established for over a month, there has been some reluctance from the community to follow their rules. FIRM was expecting this, as “big behavioral changes like these take time to become the ‘new normal,’” Weinert explained. In the first week of classes, CMUSafe Ambassadors volunteers were on the Cut monitoring compliance with the dismount zones.

Weinert said that FIRM is still evaluating if stronger compliance requirements are necessary to enforce dismount zone rules. Right now, FIRM’s focus is on increasing awareness of the zones and educating the community. More information for wheeled vehicle users can be found at cmu. edu/wheels.

The current dismount zones and shared paths are not the end of FIRM’s mission to increase safety and harmony between vehicle users and pedestrians.

“We view the current zones and shared riding path as a first, interim step towards long-term solutions further down the road,” Bob Reppe, University Architect and Assistant Vice President of Campus Design and Facility Development, told The Tartan.

“All our choices — from the location of signage, to the materials and even the words that we used — were made based on our ability to change and evolve, if needed, going forward.”

In the future, the university is planning to continue adapting campus to meet the community’s evolving transportation needs. The new dismount zones and shared use paths are only the first steps toward rethinking transportation at Carnegie Mellon.