The reconstruction of Somerville High School was completed in 2021 at a construction cost of $260,000,000. GM2’s role was to provide transportation related service including evaluation of existing traffic and multimodal conditions. The assessment reviewed desire routes for the pedestrians, boardings and alighting’s for transit users, evaluation of existing and future bicycle facilities and bicycle ridership. All modes of transportation were inventoried and assessed and data was collected for peak hour turning movements and daily volumes. For the roadway network, a robust existing condition analysis was developed including capacity analysis for 12 intersections, 10 of which were signalized. Once a comprehensive existing conditions analysis was completed, GM2’s team worked with the architect to vet several concepts relating to vehicular entrances. This was particularly critical so that the direction of flow for drop off and pick up location of staff parking could be established, which in return required the relocation of curb cuts and bus stops. The ultimate goal was to identify a hierarchy for all modes to function in a safe and efficient manner. Once the preferred alternative was developed, GM2’s team of transportation engineers evaluated the inclusion of future transportation improvement projects including the Greenline extension and the Community bike path extension. From this point, Model split and trip assignment was developed, and a build condition was evaluated, and recommendations were made.

Original photograph by Matthew Miller, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) on Commons.wikimedia.org