Consultant Review
Over the course of the past year, SBRWA also put a great deal of time and energy into working within the NYSDOT through the formal stakeholder process it is conducting for the EIS. In particular, the traffic model used by the Department has proven to be problematic. This “Best Practices Model” is intended to predict traffic flow throughout the region for the year 2030, but it does not account for any relationship between the number of vehicles on the road and potential land use and population shifts due to traffic congestion. At the June 2006 stakeholder meeting held by the NYSDOT, the model’s flaws became even more apparent to the Alliance. The data that New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) presented the preliminary modeling results of 4 alternatives in comparison to the No-Build option, and their findings were far from conclusive. The agency’s presentation was confusing and misleading, but after looking at the data more closely, the Alliance saw that all four alternatives show a reduction in vehicle and truck hours traveled for the entire study area, in the morning and evening rush hour periods, compared to the no-build alternative. The Alliance decided to hire a technical consultant to help us analyze this data in more detail.
Smart Mobility was chosen due to its has exceptional experience working with both community-based and national environmental groups, and the firm has already done a thorough critique of the NY-area traffic model that the NYSDOT is using.
Below you will find summaries and full reports in pdf format:
Traffic Assessment
Read the Full Report
Economic Assessment
Read the Full Report
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