The Quebec government has launched a new program to fund the construction of transitory schools that will be used to temporarily house students in a school undergoing renovations. The project involves the construction of a new school west of the existing École Marie-Anne located in the neighborhood of Ahuntsic, Montréal. This school will accommodate high school students for the first five to ten years before being adapted to become an elementary school. Ædifica invited Momentum to collaborate on the project for the mobility plan and the design of pick-up/drop-off areas that are functional and safe.
Momentum conducted a thorough data collection at a comparable school to determine the current usage of the parking lot and the vehicular traffic generated in the peak hours. Then the proposed layout was assessed using a VISSIM simulation and recommendations to improve the safety across the parking lot were submitted to the client. Momentum’s work helped to get a vision of other potential solutions and to propose ideas of layouts that are more people-centric to study in detail at a further stage of the project. Particularly, Momentum recommended a program to reduce the vehicular mode share to the school, in order to minimize the impact of the pick-up/drop-off area on the experience of active transportation users.
This work provided the client an overview of the vehicular operation of pick-up and drop-off areas and mitigation measures required to reduce the vehicular impact on the surrounding streets and on the future users themselves.
