Produced With
- Abeles Phillips Preiss & Shapiro
- Inc.
Other Reports in this Series
Jun 2022
436
Sep 2003
This traffic and transportation study is one of three foundations for the larger Growth Management Study which describes the interaction of three sets of issues:
In order to understand the consequences of growth, the Growth Management Study modeled three futures – slow, trend and high growth and for each of these possible futures, policy recommendations are made. The Growth Management model validated what policymakers suspected initially – that population growth and transportation issues are the biggest constraints on Stamford’s prosperity. Quite simply, an ever-widening gap between employment and population translates into the need to bring more workers into Stamford, commuting from distances that are farther and farther away. This is a trend that in the long-term cannot be sustained.
As summarized below, and described in detail elsewhere in this report, the Traffic and Transit study shows that it is possible to manage future traffic problems even if Stamford continues to grow as it has over the past decade, but only by deploying an aggressive mix of strategies that includes cooperation by employers, more transit and, most importantly, strategic land use decisions: Stamford cannot build its way out of its traffic and transit problems by widening roads and reconfiguring intersections without destroying the Quality of Life of the Neighborhoods. New housing and new commercial and industrial developments must be in locations and in configurations that support transit.
It is this last strategy - land use – that links the Traffic and Transit study to the other Goals and Objectives of the Master Plan. The design guidelines in the Urban Design Report, and summarized in the City Beautiful section of the City-wide Policies Report, assure that new development is contextual and reinforces the neighborhoods. The design studies in the Downtown section of the Action Plan demonstrate that the completion of downtown will not only protect the neighborhoods from unwanted intensification, but will put development where it is accessible to transit.
The Growth Management model quantified the dimensions of the growing population-employment gap and established some concrete traffic and Transit benchmarks and goals. Most of the detailed Traffic and Transit recommendations in this report are summarized in the Neighborhood Quality of Life and Downtown sections of the Action Plan. Below is a summary of some of the more important findings.
The future growth of Stamford and the associated traffic and transit issues need to be addressed in a regional context. Stamford’s willingness to envision anything more than slow growth must be accompanied by the acknowledgement of Stamford’s strategic role in the Fairfield County and regional economies. Stamford must leverage its willingness to undertake the mitigation measures that Stamford controls locally – TDM and land-use related actions – into cooperation by other entities to address issues beyond Stamford’s local control – such as regional transit improvements. This is especially true in regards to the regional highway network, where Stamford’s local efforts can have a significant impact on the Merritt Parkway and I-95 problems for the rest of the region. The Policy matrix at the back of this report summarizes the kinds of actions that need to be taken in terms of degrees of difficulty and implementation responsibilities.
To describe how traffic will be affected by different levels of growth in Stamford, and to describe how these effects can be mitigated, a three step process is used: first, the future traffic volumes created in each employment scenario are estimated at key auto entryways and representative intersections in Stamford. Second, the cost of making intersection improvements to handle the additional traffic volumes is estimated. Finally, the impact of various measures to reduce traffic volumes, and thus to reduce the costs of intersection improvements, is estimated.
Three kinds of mitigation measures are described: transportation demand management, transit improvements and more housing for workers in Stamford. Once these intersection costs were estimated the exercise was repeated for various packages of mitigation measures designed to reduce the volume of traffic. These measures fall into three categories including transportation demand management (TDM), transit improvements, and housing shifts for Stamford workers. TDM measures are actions that would induce single-occupant auto travelers to travel in the offpeak, share a ride, or not make the trip at all. TDM measures were further subdivided into measures that are:
a) primarily the province of employers including:
It is assumed that a reasonable employer participation in these programs could reduce peak hour single-occupant driving by 10 percent.
b) more aggressive measures that require either significant land use changes or other public policies “outside the box“. These include:
For the purpose of the traffic intersection cost analysis, it was assumed that these policies would lower single-occupant driving by 20 percent. Most of these measures can be implemented through changes in zoning or land use ordinances that could be part of the Master Plan. Transit improvements account for the second strategy that could reduce peak hour traffic. These include both bus and rail actions that would lower fares, increase the frequency of service and expand it to earlier in the morning or later in the evening, adequate parking at the boarding points, more timely connections between train and bus service, easier walking environments on the approaches to stops, and finally, greater amenity at stations and stops, including seating, shelter from the elements, more complete transit information, and better lighting. Specific actions include:
The impact of more housing in Stamford for Stamford workers was also examined. The logic is simple. If more of Stamford’s workers do not have to travel long distances, then they will occupy less road space. And if they can be located in places where they are more likely to use transit or walk to work, then traffic volumes would be lower. To estimate the amount of potential additional housing, build-out of major redevelopment projects such as Mill River, Dock Street, Northeast Utilities, and Yale & Towne were assumed. To that was added the potential housing from proposed housing projects, soft sites and in-fill in and around the downtown, and redevelopment of several large industrial sites outside downtown. Taken together, these yielded a potential for 8,000 dwelling units.
Added to this was the approximate level of in-fill growth in the last 13 years of 2,000 units, giving a total of 10,000 possible new units, which is consistent with the projections for the high growth scenario (see Urban Design and Economic Development Reports for “build-out” estimates). The likely impacts of each of these three mitigation strategies – TDM, transit, and housing – on the cost of intersection improvements for each of the three growth scenarios were made. These impacts were tested acting alone and in concert with one another, since there is no reason to select one category to the exclusion of the other two. The results are described in the Key Findings section. A fuller explanation of the traffic estimating procedures is presented as Appendix A.
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