Yosemite Valley’s Roadway Circulation Pilot during the 2021 Summer Season 

Date and Time: 8/31/2022
Location: Tamarack

Presenter: Rinal Chheda, Senior Transportation Engineer, Atkins North America

  

 

 

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

As our popular national parks and public lands get inundated with visitors, traffic congestion and it’s impact on visitor experience becomes a major concern. Parks have limited options for mitigating the causes of roadway congestion and must work under several constraints including right-of-way and impacts to environment and cultural resources. When feasible and innovative solutions are identified, there can be several barriers to implement them such as managing driver expectations, obtaining compliance and other permits, uncertainty of results, and uncertainty of the lifecycle of those improvements. In such situations, implementing the solutions as a pilot has several advantages – it helps build confidence in the solutions, it can quantify benefits, it can identify unforeseen issues and resolve them before permanent construction, and it provides an option to return the roadway network to its original form if required. Every local transportation system is unique, especially in national parks, so a pilot can demonstrate if the solutions address the inherent problems.

This presentation will discuss how the solutions identified through a modeling exercise were piloted in Yosemite Valley during the summer of 2021. Implementation of the pilot involved converting certain roads to one-way circulation, modifying intersection configurations through use of temporary barriers and delineators, converting a roadway to contraflow configuration, deploying temporary striping and signage, obtaining compliance permits for the pilot, incorporating considerations for emergency vehicles and traffic demand management, and gathering before-after data to evaluate the effectiveness of the pilot circulation system. Queue length and travel time data from the pilot were used to validate modeling results. The presentation will also discuss the challenges encountered in the implementation process, creative solutions to make the pilot a success, and lessons learned.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Rinal Chheda, PE, PTOE, is a senior transportation engineer with Atkins. Her background is in data analyses, traffic modeling, and engineering. Rinal graduated from MIT with a Master of Science in Transportation degree in 2014. She currently serves as the treasurer for WTS Colorado and is a member of TRB’s AEP20 Standing Committee on Transportation Needs of National Parks and Public Lands.
She lives in Denver, Colorado and enjoys gardening, reading non-fiction, and hiking.