Introduction

[Please find a pdf version of this web-based report here]

As a small liberal arts campus in the Lehigh Valley, the Lafayette community has made great strides towards staying green and becoming a walking campus. However, being located in a hilly region, the school and its surrounding community sometimes face problems with smoothly accessing certain areas of the campus. In the recent years, the Lafayette campus has been expanding down the hill onto the area on Third St. near the Route 22 overpass in order to create a state of the art Visual Arts campus. As of now, there are three different ways of accessing the arts campus: the main stairs on the side of the hill that start by the back of Reuf and Keefe Halls to the bottom of the hill, the LCAT student bus shuttle, and by student’s personal vehicles. We believe that by working with the Lafayette community we can come up with a safer and more realistic way of accessing the campus at the bottom of the hill.

The current physical access from the main campus to the arts campus is dilapidated, dangerous, and inconvenient. There are 90 steps from the back of Reuf Hall to the bottom of the hill. The stairs are in poor condition and become dangerous with inclement weather conditions. In addition to the poor condition of the stairway, it also egresses directly into a busy intersection. These issues make it difficult for students to move between the two campuses and thus creates a divide between the main campus and the arts campus. As the school continues to develop the arts campus, the area from the base of the hill to the Rt. 22 overpass, and more classes and offices are moved down to that area, a better solution to this transition needs to developed. Also with the emphasis being put on Lafayette being a walking campus, it’s contradictory to have a major segment of campus that the majority of students drive to. The main problem that we are trying to tackle is to overcome the divide in the arts division from the rest of the campus by extending the college’s community beyond the hilltop. In efforts to fix this problem, we want to create a seamless access from the main campus to the arts campus that is easily available and safe. Access should also be tailored with student convenience in mind. Student involvement is essential for a successful solution. Surveys and public forums will be important tools in tailoring a solution that is most likely to be used by the maximum amount of students within a reasonable budget and feasibility parameters. Instead of simply viewing the solution as a connection of the arts campus to the main campus, we want to emphasize that this problem goes farther than a physical issue, but includes the division of our small community. We want to be able to come up with a way to get all parts of Lafayette’s campus to work together in binding one strong community.

 

In addition to accessing the arts campus by the main stairs, the school has hired shuttle buses to run on a continuous loop to and from the bottom of the campus to the top of the hill where the main campus is located. This is a short-term solution implemented by the school that is not efficient and according to a student survey, is hardly used by the Lafayette community.

As of now, the school has no large scale plans set to address the problem. We find that it is important to resurface this issue with our community due to the fact that this problem that has been brought up several times over the past years with no long term solution.  Our main goal that we, as Engineering Studies students are trying to achieve, is to raise awareness of the hazards that are posted by the school’s current methods of travel to and from the Third St. campus. By sending out surveys to collect information, and by creatively constructing a video with the help of the Lafayette student body, we believe that we can attract the attention of the school’s administration in order to take the first steps to properly addressing the problem.

There are several steps that need to be taken in order to begin this project. With the help of several different departments including the Civil Engineering department, Art department, Plant Operations, Facilities Planning and Construction, and Public Safety, we believe that a proper analysis can be carried out in order to create a lasting solution for the issues. This project is split up into four main analytical steps: Social Context Analysis, Policy Analysis, Economic Analysis, and Technical Analysis. To begin this project and bring what we found to be a big problem back into the spotlight, our group had to perform thorough research and investigate the current conditions of the third street campus. We began by looking into the social context of the stairs and the Lafayette community. In the past, there have been several accounts of student theses, research projects, and capstone projects that have highlighted this same issue over the conditions. In addition to researching past work, we also conducted our own surveys that were sent out to Lafayette students, along with interviewing some of our contacts. After collecting initial data, our next two steps that we worked on simultaneously were policy and economic analyses. This is where we evaluated other alternatives based off of several criteria and looked into the economic side of our three alternatives so that we would be able to work towards a reasonable solution. Our last step before coming to a conclusion was the technical analysis. This part of the process looked into the technology relevant to the three alternatives that were evaluated, along with a technological analysis of how we were constructing the project. The Engineering Studies program emphasizes the importance of social context in engineering systems, and that is something that we are striving to highlight with this project.