One Westfield Place Traffic Engineering Analysis Reports
by Kimley Horn Traffic Engineers for Streetworks Development
Traffic ReportPeer Review Analysis and Findings - Marvin C. Gersten, St. Marks Ave.
Marv Gersten: Traffic Report Review
Marv Gersten: Statement to Westfield Town Council
Excerpts below:
A Westfield resident since 1972, I am a retired Professional Engineer and Life Member of both the American Society of Civil Engineers and Institute of Transportation Engineer. I have been involved in traffic and transportation engineering studies and plans for my entire professional career and have been appointed by Westfield Mayors over the years to the Union County Transportation Advisory Board.
Our resident traffic engineer performed a peer review of the developer’s traffic report. The traffic report assumes a traffic growth rate of .26% / year for 5 years. and uses the ITE standard data for modeling input. He highlighted 8 critical intersections which are identified in the adjacent chart.
An important factor is trip generation and volume of vehicular traffic. The development increases the traffic on average by 200- 400 cars in the AM and PM peak hour. At these 8 critical intersections the total volume of vehicles at the peak is forecasted to be between 2900 - 3200 cars.
Many of those intersections currently perform at a Level of Service (LOS) D, E or F. The levels of service indicate the amount of vehicle wait time at an intersection or timed signal. For example, these delay times can be range between 35 seconds and 1.5 minutes or greater at LOS D, E, or F. LOS D acceptable wait time is 35 - 55 seconds per vehicle. According to the Kimley Horn Report,
LOS D is the Town's acceptable value / best practice standard, but the report qualifies this by saying that a "certain level of congestion is acceptable, particularly in transit-friendly communities, and that congestion mitigation must be balanced with Westfield's other multimodal travel and community goals."
Ultimately, what the report indicated is that at least at the 8 critical intersections, in the current ‘no build’ scenario, the LOS levels do not meet the best practice standard. In the 2027 ‘build’ condition the LOS does get worse to LOS E and F. And more importantly, in the 2027 build condition with mitigations, only 2 of the intersections improve to the best practice standard.
We have concerns with the following assumptions
background growth of vehicular traffic of .25% is low and contradicts with a statement by the traffic engineer of .75% - this would increase the number of cars by at least 100/peak hour
the number of cars generated by the proposed office buildings - 70% versus 85%. Although this building is located adjacent to the train station, most people in Union County travel by car and employees coming from outside of Union County would definitely drive.
The total transportation network was not studied and there is empirical evidence that shows that vehicles are already cutting through certain residential streets to avoid traffic delays on the arterial roads.
Peer Review Analysis and Findings