May 29, 2025

The students aimed to address traffic issues at two I-70 interchanges in Columbia: Providence Road and Rangeline Street.

A student’s Mizzou Engineering experience isn’t complete without a hands-on capstone project. These group projects encourage civil engineering students to work on a real-world problem proposed by an external partner and design an innovative solution.

Maddie Beins, Kaitlyn Blagg, Cassie Lueck, Campbell Marino and Velissia Perez, all interested in the transportation sector within civil engineering, received a project from the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) to improve I-70.

Learn more about their work and what they learned by working on this project.

Goal: address traffic issues at two I-70 interchanges in Columbia

The Providence Road interchange experiences peak-hour backups, and at Rangeline Street roundabouts raise safety concerns. The short distance between the interchanges also creates merging and weaving hazards.

These issues are parts of the ongoing Improve I-70 project, which will expand I-70 to six lanes across Missouri.

Project approach

The team began with a site visit to assess the existing conditions of the two interchanges. Each team member then developed individual design concepts, which were shared and refined into a few final alternatives. Some of the ideas came from doing research on other interchanges in Missouri and applying those concepts to our interchanges.

Using VISSIM traffic simulation software, they ran simulations to evaluate the performance of each design. After, they compared the alternatives based on traffic flow, cost, safety, right-of-way acquisition, utility impacts, environmental effects and constructability to select the most effective solution.

Finally, the team conducted a hydraulic analysis to ensure that the surrounding areas and culverts were equipped to handle water events and prevent flooding.

The solution

The students proposed implementing a single point urban interchange (SPUI) at Providence Road, shown on the left side of the figure above. This design consolidates all traffic movements at a single signal, improving efficiency and reducing congestion.

At Rangeline, shown on the right, they chose to retain the existing layout but enhance it with improved signage. This included updated striping to provide clearer guidance for drivers and reduce the likelihood of accidents at the roundabouts.

Hands-on learning in action

Through this project, the students engaged in the Missouri Method of hands-on learning. Beins said that she learned that there is a lot that goes into building a bridge — “It’s so complex that one engineer cannot do it alone” — and Blagg said that she learned how to apply city and state policies/guidelines to problem-solving methods.

“Making an initial schedule and being organized every week was a large part of this project,” Marino said. “Time catches up to you quickly. It was overwhelming at first, especially because we were tasked with such a hard project to design. It was easy to throw out intersection options but pairing them up with each other’s options was the hardest part.”

Perez agreed.

“I gained valuable project management experience and learned the importance of having a clear schedule and sticking to it,” she said. “At first, it felt like we had plenty of time, but once we laid out the timeline, it became clear how much work was involved, including using information learned from our fundamental classes. The VISSIM simulation models was information we learned in Fundamentals of Transportation, the soil information we learned in Fundamentals of Geotechnical Engineering, and the hydraulic analysis used information from Fundamentals of Water Resources.”

From the classroom into the real world

Perez emphasized that the opportunity to work on Improve I-70 as a student was a unique experience.

“Improve I-70 is a big project going on in the state and it will be going on for the next few years,” she said. “Some of us in the group are going to be working in transportation after graduation, so there’s a chance that we’ll get to work on an I-70 project like this one after graduation as well.”

Marino said the capstone class was a great way to wrap up the civil engineering curriculum.

“It encompassed all aspects of our engineering classes,” she said. “It helped with learning how to communicate with each other and our clients. Those relationships are almost more important than the classwork itself. Being in this capstone class helped us learn how to present effectively and respond to the client’s needs.”

Learn more about civil engineering at Mizzou!