Ever since the RBC Center’s opening in 1999 the traffic scheme in and out of the parking lots has been an enigma. Each year the traffic plan is changed, but a true solution is never found. While the plan for egress and ingress are different, hard game times make the ingress plan more important to the experience of the RBC Center’s customers.

I’m not sure if the traffic plan is different for NCSU games than it is for Carolina Hurricanes games, but the parking designation for the events is definitely different. The Hurricanes largely sell the lot spaces as day-of-event general admission while the basketball games get reserved section parking.

The arena has six paved lots surrounding its North, West, and South sides and has two small VIP lots outside its main entrance. The west side of the arena is served largely by access from the variable direction, five-lane Edwards Mill Road while the east side is served from a three-lane Westchase Blvd. All perimeter roads around the arena on the property have three lanes.

There are a few caveats to planning traffic ingress. There must be a lane reserved on each road for emergency vehicle egress. Thus, the 3-lane roads can only use two lanes in any particular direction. Additionally, it seems that the City of Raleigh insists that at least one lane on Edwards Mill Road be marked for upstream traffic.

Regardless, there are two easy answers for creating smooth ingress for events. Using the existing roads, simple lane assignments should solve all problems. Because there are three parking lots on the building’s West side (Lots 4, 5, and 6), one lane should be designated for each lot from Wade Avenue inward. The illustration above show the first solution, and is a detail view of this area.

Currently VIP traffic enters from Trinity Road while traffic for Lots 4, 5, and 6 enter from Edwards Mill Road and turn onto Karmanos Blvd. The leftmost lane gets an uninterrupted pass to the center lane on Karmanos. The two lanes to the right of this Edwards Mill Lane (shown in yellow and red) currently cue onto the arena’s entry road and have to be alternated into Karmanos’ right lane. The alternation introduces stoppages that cause ripples of flow interruption back into feeder roads, resulting in massive, unnecessary delays.

A better plan assigns each lane to a destination parking lot. Lot 4 traffic should continue to use the leftmost lane from Edwards Mill Rd. The cars will use a path shown in green, and will turn onto Karmanos Blvd’s center lane and continue unimpeded past the existing entrances to Lots 5 and 6.

The lane second from the left-most lane should be dedicated to Lot 5. This path, shown in yellow, will turn, uninterrupted, onto Karmanos’ right-most lane and proceed to the first Lot 5 entrance.

The third lane should be reserved for Lot 6 cars. These cars will use Edwards Mill’s lane second from the right, and will not turn onto Karmanos Blvd. Instead they will proceed straight and use the middle lane of the RBC Center’s road to the front door. These cars will turn left into their proper bays in Lot 6 for NCSU games. This is shown in pink in the illustration and is described on page 8 of the current NCSU Basketball Fan Guide (.PDF file). For events where Lot 6 spaces are not reserved, drivers should turn into the lot at the first two rows where parking attendants can collect parking fees.

VIP traffic will use the entrance on Trinity Road and turn right onto the arena’s main road, bypassing the Lot 6 traffic. Emergency egress is served by the leftmost lanes on Karmanos and the RBC Center’s main drive. With this plan all East parking lots would be served by the 3-lane Westchase Blvd.

Communication of this scheme is important. Currently there is no signage to inform drivers on Edwards Mill Road which lane goes where. Instead the street should have low resolution LED signage stretching across Edwards Mill that marks each lane’s destination so that drivers won’t need to make lane shifts once they have entered the dedicated queues.

With this plan cars will be able to continue smoothly from their designated lane far in advance of the parking lot entrances. There will be no 3-lane-to-2 bottlenecks or a need for merging or halting lanes. Traffic will flow smoothly and patrons will be happily in their seats before events start.

Continue reading Part II