Matt Boone/SPPSThe intersection at Prices Fork Road and North Main Street will become home to a roundabout next year.

Blacksburg's Various Intersections Project will affect eight intersections across town with upgrades including new turning lanes, new traffic and pedestrian signals, pedestrian islands and signal light changes to improve traffic flow.

A separate project will have two proposed roundabouts to replace conventional signal-light intersections at high traffic areas in Blacksburg.

Virginia Tech's Board of Visitors has also approved plans for a 1,200-space parking garage to expand campus parking.

The Various Intersections Project is a joint bid between the town and Tech.

The project will cost $4.4 million — $1.4 million coming from Tech — and will run through August 2009, affecting six intersections adjacent to campus and two off campus.

The work will not close any intersections and traffic will be slowed but not stopped at the work sites, said Urban Transportation Manager Brandon Steele.

Virginia Tech Transportation Director Steve Mouras said a 2003 Virginia Department of Transportation study shows that none of the intersections scheduled for construction would be sufficient to handle the traffic flow by 2023 if they are not expanded.

Major work will change the Prices Fork Road/West Campus Drive intersection. Going east on Prices Fork toward town, the right turning lane onto campus will be extended and will become a "hot right" – meaning that it will not stop for traffic signals.

A new left-turn-only lane will be added to the northbound lanes, leaving campus, of West Campus Drive.

New traffic and pedestrian signals will also be added.

The commuter lot access road will get a new, dedicated right-turn lane for cars turning right out of the lot onto West Campus Drive.

The West Campus Drive/Perry Street intersection will receive new traffic signals, crosswalks and pedestrian signals.

The Prices Fork Road/Stanger Street intersection will receive new turning lanes and a pedestrian island.

The Stanger Street/Perry Street intersection will receive new turning lanes as well.

U.K.-style roundabouts are proposed to replace the conventional intersections of Givens Lane, Progress Street and Aden Lane in one area and North Main Street and Prices Fork Road in another.

Planners expect this type of junction, where traffic flows in a circle around an island at about 15 to 25 miles per hour, will calm traffic and reduce vehicle collisions.

The Virginia Department of Transportation recently published a revision of its road design manual. Roundabouts will become the department's preferred alternative to intersections, according to a statement by Walter Pribble, senior transportation manager for VDOT.

"This is just a good way to handle traffic and provide a safe intersection," Mark Jamison, Roanoke's traffic engineer, said to the Roanoke Times of similar proposed roundabouts there.

A roundabout usually costs between $400,000 and $1.2 million to build, Pribble said. The question of who picks up the tab depends on where it is built.

Safety is the benefit of roundabouts proponents cite most often. A 2001 study of 23 intersections by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported that converting traffic signals or stop signs to roundabouts reduced injury crashes by 80 percent and overall crashes by 40 percent.

In 2002, Blacksburg's first experience with a circular intersection ended quickly. The town spent $500 to introduce a traffic circle, which is similar to a roundabout but larger and with a higher speed limit, to slow traffic at Draper Road and Clay Street. Residents complained and it was removed within two months.

"People were really, really confused," said Bill Brown, the town's police chief at the time.

Citing a statistic from the U.S. Department of Transportation, Pribble said people are usually against roundabouts 2-to-1 before construction, but that they tend to favor them 3-to-1 after construction.

The BOV approved plans for a 1,200-space parking garage to be built in the commuter lot behind Cowgill Hall.

The garage, expected to cost between $25 million and $30 million and be three or four stories tall, will provide the university 900 to 1,000 parking spaces when it's completed in early 2011, Mouras said.

A garage is needed because there's simply no room to add surface lots, Mouras said. New buildings will add more demand for parking on that side of campus and take up open space currently used for parking.

Like road construction, parking structures should be built to anticipate need — it's far less expensive to build spaces into the initial structure than it is to add onto it after the fact.

"Someone said, 'Well, Steve, you know, at least guarantee me that the garage will be completely full the day you open it.' Well, I actually hope not,'" Mouras said. "I would hope that it would have some capacity so that in five or 10 years it would fill up," Mouras said.

The project plans would likely involve working on the intersections away from campus first, starting in May.