UT Tyler Office of Marketing and Communications

Patriot Spotlight: UT Tyler Professor Involved in City of Tyler’s Bike Lane Project

September 30, 2016

Media Contact:  Hannah Buchanan
Editor/Writer–Strategic Communications & Media Relations
Marketing and Communications
The University of Texas at Tyler
903.539.7196 (cell)

Souliman

UT Tyler assistant professor of civil engineering Dr. Mena Souliman is assisting the City of Tyler in developing a map for a bike lane network in Tyler.

In recent years, the city has experienced substantial developments across the city. A growth in population has increased the number of bicyclists. The increase has given incentive to Tyler to implement a much friendlier environment towards bicyclists, according to Souliman.

"The UT Tyler research team has been given the opportunity to study methodologies that will generate an efficient bike network, which will help design a dynamic bike lane network for the City of Tyler," said Souliman, who received extramural funding by the Retail Merchants Association of Tyler Charitable Fund from the East Texas Communities Foundation. "The city intends to implement bicycle lanes into the transportation system to provide the community with an efficient mode of transport. The bike lane network will extend to the exterior part of the city and reach downtown."

The process is comprised of attentive planning, progressive development and a collective effort by the UT Tyler traffic engineering research team to design an exceptional bike lane network, Souliman added.

As part of the project, Souliman will also develop a "hub-and-spoke'' bike lane map for the city to be implemented in Texas.

"Consider the structure of a bicycle wheel. The spokes of the wheel are the bicycles lanes, with the center hub being downtown Tyler," Souliman said. "The hub-and-spoke bike lane attempts to include an engineered evaluation and scoring criteria to select bike lane spokes.

"This will incorporate multiple factors such as lane width, geometric design features and amount of current vehicle traffic in order to provide and facilitate safe travel and compliment present transit systems. Present bike networks were implemented into the design to increase accessibility," he added.

For more information, contact Souliman, 903.565.5892 or msouliman@uttyler.edu.

Serving UT Tyler since 2014, Souliman has more than eight years of experience in pavement analysis, design and characterization. His research interests include pavement materials design, advanced pavement laboratory characterization, pavement management systems and modeling and computer applications in transportation engineering.