The University of Mississippi plans to spend the next two years studying roads, walkways and other paths to develop a transportation safety action plan using a $959,000 grant from the Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program. Photo by Marlee Crawford/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services
Grant to fund study of pedestrian, driver safety in Oxford and surrounding community
The U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded the University of Mississippi nearly $1 million to study pedestrian and driver safety on and around campus.
The department’s Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program has provided $959,611 to develop a new action plan for road safety for Oxford and the UM campus.
Over the next two years, members of the campus community will work with representatives of Oxford and Lafayette County to assess existing roadways, sidewalks and paths to create the safety action plan, said Samuel Patterson, director of the Department of Parking and Transportation.
“With our growth as a university, we’re not the same Ole Miss we were 10 years ago, and how we move around the campus is changing, too,” Patterson said. “We need a visionary approach to how we’re going to take on the future.
“This grant gives us an opportunity to look at planning for an Oxford of the future.”
Building infrastructure for college towns like Oxford is difficult because of the evolving population, said Coleman Grimmett, UM senior director of business operations. Though Oxford has about 26,000 full-time residents, the university’s student population has grown steadily in the last decade to an additional 20,000 during the school year.
As the university continues to grow – a university record of 24,710 students enrolled across the university’s seven campuses in the fall of 2023 – so too change the needs of pedestrians and drivers in the area, Patterson said.
“It’s not up to our standards and what we think our standards should be,” he said. “We look at the SS4A (Safe Streets and Roads for All) program as a way for us to accomplish that.”
On game days and during other events, the city can play host to 90,000 visitors, causing increased congestion and more pedestrian traffic, Grimmett said.
“It is a unique difficulty,” he said. “Not only do we have 90,000 to 100,000 people here in Oxford; they’re all condensed down into one regional area.”
The primary goal is to make Oxford and the surrounding community safer for the faculty, staff, students and residents who walk, bike, bus or drive its streets every day, Patterson said.
“With this growth and where we’re going, these outside areas are now a part of campus and students are using different ways to get there,” he said. “You see students on electric scooters, bikes, one-wheel scooters.
“We have to think differently, and this grant will help us to that vision of getting there.”
Grimmett and Patterson will lead the university’s safety action plan committee. They also will work with local representatives and community members to determine how Oxford can become a safer city for visitors and denizens alike.
“Our goal is to involve the best and brightest industry leaders to ensure this funding makes a lasting impact on our Oxford-Ole Miss campus and community, eliminates traffic fatalities within this area and improves overall transportation and pedestrian mobility safety significantly,” Grimmett said. “This is not just a university initiative; it’s a community initiative.
“We want to engage the City of Oxford, the Mississippi Department of Transportation, OPD, UPD, the Associated Student Body, staff council – we’ll need input from all these people who live and work here every day.”
By Clara Turnage
