Sustainable Transportation and Grounds in UIC - University of ...

Report to UIC Chancellor’s Committee on Sustainability and Energy
Major Findings
UIC has a total of 41 parking lots with 11,944 parking spaces in the
East and West campuses combined. Intercampus shuttle buses
provide service between East, West and South campuses. Oncampus
paratransit service is available with appropriate authorization
for UIC faculty, students and staff with disabilities. The Red Car/Off-
Hour Paratransit Service is an escort service that provides
transportation to university employees, students, visitors, and other
authorized individuals between university facilities and from university
facilities to points of public transportation, or to private residences
within a designated area and a Chauffeur service is also available.
Commuter buses operate between the campus and the Union and
Northwestern Metra train stations. The Chicago Transit Authority
operates several bus routes through the campus area and the Blue
line “El” goes through the north and west side of campus.
Campus fleet vehicles include those used for Campus Auto Rental
Service, the campus police, departmental use, and vehicles used for
on-site operations and maintenance.
UIC has 25,000 students and over 12,000 faculty and staff. Visitors,
hospital patients and special event attendees also add to the demand
for transportation and use of grounds facilities. In FY2007, meetings
and conferences on campus hosted 397,572 guests at 10,268
meetings in the UIC Student Centers. A total of 331,757 visits were
made to the Student Recreation Facility and 155,395 were made to
the Sport and Fitness Center. This included 17,264 unique individuals.
The UIC Pavilion attracted 296,044 people to 125 events. Attendance
at events sponsored by Campus Programs was 176,991. UIC Flames
home basketball games drew 74,254 sports fans.
Residential Locations and Commuting Distances
Figure 1 shows a map of zipcodes where UIC faculty and staff reside.
While faculty and staff reside in neighborhoods that are scattered all
over the six-county Northeastern Illinois region (comprising Cook,
DuPage, Lake, Will, McHenry and Kane counties), there are clusters
of areas within 10-15 miles with high concentrations of faculty and
staff.
Commuters typically decide on the mode of transportation to use not
only on the basis of convenience and cost of different options, but
also on the basis of the availability of the options to them. For this
reason, we have analyzed the extent to which taking transit or walking
are options to UIC faculty and staff. Figure 2 shows the level of transit
availability in the Chicago metro area, with the intensity of UIC
faculty/staff superimposed by graduated dots, which are indicative of
the number of faculty/staff. The Transit Availability Index (TAI) is a
7