Prince William County will get new funding to plan for a new shuttle service to serve the George Mason University Science and Technology Campus near Manassas.
The campus is the Prince William County hub for the Fairfax-based university. In addition to the school, the area surrounding campus, Innovation Park, is filled with technology companies, and the FBI Northern Virginia Regional Headquarters.
The county has long envisioned Innovation Park to become a center of activity in the county since the local government purchased the land for development in the late 1990s. Since then, the county has been selling off portions of the property to firms it thinks will will create jobs.
The shuttle would not only service the Innovation Park area but would also serve a new transit bus the could be built. That hub would replace a Virginia Railway Express station that had been slated to be built near the Science and Technology Campus. The project was killed at the same time VRE decided not to build a rail extension to Haymarket.
Paolo J. Belita, with the Prince William County Department of Transportation, provides more details about the upcoming shuttle bus study.
As part of the [Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Transportation Planning Board] Transportation/Land-Use Connections (TLC) Fiscal Year 2021 Program, the county will be receiving $55,000 in technical assistance for the Innovation Shuttle study.
The proposed project is a feasibility study to determine the capital infrastructure and operational needs to implement a shuttle service. The project will enhance access to the Innovation Regional Activity Center and high-capacity transit station and will provide a new transit option for multimodal connections to rail and bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure in this Transit Access Focus Area.
The proposed final product will be a planning study that includes the following:
•Overview of existing data on land use/road network and future land use and mobility plans in the Small Area Plan
•Ridership projections based on existing and future population and employment
• Map of recommended shuttle stops and routes based on prioritized origin-destination points
• Proposed shuttle capacity and service frequency based on ridership projections
• Planning level concepts for shuttle stops (including proposed pull off areas
• Signage
• Lighting
• Shelters (and other proposed passenger amenities)
• Planning level cost estimates for proposed capital infrastructure and operations
• Analysis of the feasibility of using autonomous vehicles for the proposed service
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