Under construction

by Christopher Sanchez

Daily Lobo

There are no plans to relieve traffic when UNM's Stanford entrance closes for the next two years starting Monday, said Clovis Acosta, director of Parking and Transportation Services.

The entrance is one of two off Central Avenue and will be closed due to the construction of George Pearl Hall, which will house the School of Architecture and Planning.

Visitors, students and faculty will have to take shuttles to the University as much as possible to lessen traffic, Acosta said.

"We're not going to be able to alleviate (traffic)," he said. "We'll just have to wait and see."

UNM student Ray Schreck said the construction site will cause traffic problems for students and faculty driving along Redondo Drive.

"I can just imagine," he said. "It's not going to be a pretty sight."

The construction project will create an obvious inconvenience to those driving on Redondo Drive, said Roger Lujan, director of Facility Planning.

"I think there will be traffic, but it will be dealt with and medicated," he said.

Contractors are obligated to manage traffic flow but only at the construction site, he said. He said there will be construction workers at the crosswalk navigating vehicles.

The visitor's parking lot adjacent to the UNM Bookstore will lose 80 spaces because the building will occupy its space, said Acosta. He said visitors have to use the Cornell Parking Structure, which has a capacity of 440 vehicles and was built two years ago to replace the lot adjacent to the bookstore.

Despite the construction, business will continue at the bookstore, said Melanie Sparks, director of the UNM Bookstore. She said the bookstore will hang advertisements on the construction fences.

"We have to be supportive of campus initiatives, so we are going to do the best we can do and market really well so people know how to get to us," Sparks said.

Schreck said he parks in the visitor's parking lot whenever he gets the chance because he had trouble finding other parking.

"It's going to be a nightmare," he said. "I have a B Lot sticker, and I can never find a place to park over there, so I have to park elsewhere, and I land up getting a ticket."

Sparks said the Cornell Parking Structure is a few feet away from the bookstore, so finding a place to park will not be bad. On any given day, the parking structure usually has 300 to 350 vehicles and is seldom at full capacity, Acosta said. The parking structure will be more crowded once the construction project begins, he said.

"It's not going to be full all the time, and people won't be rejected all the time," Acosta said.

If the structure reaches full capacity, visitors will have to wait until there are more parking spaces or find a parking meter, he said.

Redondo Drive around the parking structure will be reduced from three lanes to two. Because of this, visitors wanting to park in the parking structure will have to head west, Acosta said.

"When the construction fence goes up, it goes past Stanford and doesn't allow vehicles to queue and to take a left turn," he said. "You need three lanes for that."

He said the best way to get to the parking structure would be to go through the north entrance to campus across from UNM Hospital at Lomas Boulevard and Stanford Drive.

Mary Power, an English professor, said people should not complain about losing the parking lot.

"I just don't see how anyone can protest the need of an architecture building," Power said. "They come first."

The lack of visitor parking spaces should not affect parking for patrons of Popejoy Hall, said Tom Tkach, director of Popejoy Hall.

"We won't know until it happens," he said. "We will have to deal with these situations as the campus grows."

About 90 percent of Popejoy Hall patrons park at G Lot and are shuttled to Popejoy Hall for free, he said.

"There is a lot more parking off campus than on campus," Tkach said.

Patrons will not experience any change, he said, but they will have to learn where to enter campus. He said Popejoy has e-mailed its regular patrons about the closure of the Stanford entrance.

Schreck said he was not looking forward to next week when construction of the project begins.

"It'll be OK, until they start tearing it up," he said. "Once they tear it up, the party's over."