Photos courtesy of The Daily Progress Photo Collections.

As three University of Virginia students followed Engineering School Professor James F. Groves and Albemarle County (Va.) worker Dan Mahon through thickets and brush, they were learning just how hard it can be in the modern world to create even something as basic as a trail.

When Samantha Rowell (CE ’08), Patrick Neyland (SE ’08) and Dan Restivo (CE ’08) re-emerged from the tangles, they were dripping sweat — and it wasn’t the first time. The University students, together with high school student Zach Starsia, spent their summer vacation working their muscles and their brains, looking for a community trailhead location for a proposed trail system.

The students, directed by Groves, assistant dean for research and outreach in U.Va.’s Engineering School, were implementing a project that began in an introduction to engineering course that Groves taught to first-years at U.Va. The course takes students through the engineering design process of how to identify a problem and then innovate toward a solution.

Groves identified the traffic congestion in the area as the problem and asked his students to select a project involving transportation alternatives in Charlottesville, Va. Their selection was the development of a final conceptual design for walking and biking paths in the Biscuit Run area south of Charlottesville.

The students discovered that in addition to plans and drawings, an engineering project often calls for permits, public input, cutting through red tape and a host of other hurdles, both anticipated and unexpected. Groves said giving future engineers a good taste of these real-world challenges is critical to their education.

“Here in the Engineering School, we have something called an Engineering in Context program at the undergraduate level,” Groves said. “The idea is that, yes, engineers do lots of math, science and number crunching. But ultimately to get projects implemented in society, there’s a lot more to do than just that. They have to understand community response to something that they might develop.”

Photos courtesy of The Daily Progress Photo Collections.

The students identified the pieces of property and were charged with discovering who owned what. They found that the 1,353 acres of land known as Biscuit Run and Forest Lodge were purchased by Forest Lodge LLC and, because the land is in one of the county’s designated-growth areas, it eventually could contain as many as 4,970 residential units. Suddenly, the initial work became even more important — and the deadlines more immediate. Consequently, once the school year ended, Groves decided to move the Biscuit Run trail system concept to the next level.

With $6,000 of his own money and additional financial support from the Engineering School, Groves hired the four students to work on the project this past summer. Mahon, greenways/ blueways supervisor for Albemarle County, worked closely with the students. Much of the summer work the students did consisted of working toward securing property access rights from land owners. “I went to a lot of existing trails in the area and to those being proposed and mapped them out with a GPS,” said Restivo, who is looking at a career in environmental engineering when he graduates. Mahon said the information Restivo gathered will go into the county’s geographic information system. He is already using data Neyland gathered this summer concerning trails and crime in order to show the positive effects trails can have.

Because of monetary considerations, Groves was able to hire only four students for the project on a first-come-first-served basis. He said there were a host of reasons why he donated $6,000 of his personal funds to the project. “I suppose a little bit of it has to do with putting your money where your mouth is,” Groves said. “I personally have a concern about the environment and global warming. If you create something like the Biscuit Run trail system we are envisioning, perhaps you can entice a few more people into using alternative means of transportation. And, in the process, we have helped some engineering students really see what it ultimately takes to get projects implemented in our society.”

This is an abbreviated version of a story that appeared in The Daily Progress on August 30, 2006. Read the original story.