The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
The owner of the Rutgers Plaza shopping center is studying whether a traffic light at the plaza’s John F. Kennedy Boulevard entrance would help mitigate traffic that might be generated by a planned 200-unit apartment building on the site.
Levin Properties wants to raze the former K-Mart building and in its place construct a four-story apartment building.
The idea of a traffic light study was mentioned by Karl Pehnke, the project’s traffic engineer, during the Zoning Board of Adjustment’s August 1 hearing on the controversial application.
The traffic engineer was the only witness to testify during the three-hour meeting, the bulk of which was taken up by questions of David Minno, the project’s architect who testified at the application’s June hearing, and Pehnke.
Pehnke said that while traffic signals can be used to mitigate traffic issues at problematic intersections, they are not panaceas.
“There’s issues with a traffic signal, particularly at that location,” he said. “We have a traffic signal at New Brunswick (Road). We have a traffic signal at Easton (Avenue). They’re both relatively close.”
“Putting a traffic signal just at a commercial driveway in-between may or may not have a negative influence on those locations, it’s not simple,” he said. “There’s other influencing factors that we need to consider.”
Pehnke said the traffic signal study was being done at the suggestion of CME Associates, the Township’s consulting engineering firm.
The study will take a while, he said.
“The traffic signal has a whole analysis that needs to be done to determine whether it’s appropriate because traffic signals are not always appropriate for use,” he said.
Pehnke said that putting an apartment building in place of the department store would result in less auto traffic.
“On a straight comparison of the 100,000 (square-foot) or so retail to the 200 residential units, what you’ll see is roughly 90 to 100 less vehicles per hour generated at the driveways coming in and out of this site during the evening peak hour, one-hour period,” he said. “Over the course of the day, the weekday, there’s over 5,000 less vehicles that would enter and exit the site.”
“And then Saturday, of course, which is your highest generation days for retail, they could be close to over 7,000 less vehicles entering and exiting this driveway,” he said.
There would be “substantially less traffic impact to the adjacent roadway with the granting of use variance of 200 units versus the site being reoccupied, redeveloped with a higher level of commercial retail space,” Pehnke said.
Pehnke had spent some time at the beginning of his testimony reviewing how traffic engineers use category specific data to make their estimates.
Pehnke told the Board that the apartment building would generate about 20 car trips into and out of the site during the peak weekday traffic hour, a claim that Board member Robert Shepherd found hard to accept.
“Now, hold on, now; did you say that in the morning the apartments would generate only 20 trips?” Shepherd asked.
“Less than 20 trips on JFK Boulevard heading to the west. The rest would be heading to Easton Avenue,” Pehnke said.
“Okay. Well, what’s the total number of trips you think will be generated?” Shepherd asked. “I think there’s probably going to be 400 cars for the people that are living there.”
“So what we know is, you know, in terms of residential development, your flow of traffic is dispersed over a time frame,” Pehnke said. “So like if you’re leaving to go to work in the morning, you don’t all get in the car at 8 o’clock and you don’t turn over 400 cars at once. If you start leaving at 6 o’clock in the morning, 7, 8, 9, with COVID, that’s changed a little bit. Some people are staying home, some people are zoning in at 10, some people are going to meetings, so we expect that’s going to reduce traffic generation further.”
“So we expect leaving the site in the morning for the course of a one hour period, about 65 vehicles,” he said.
“Only 65 vehicles?” Shepherd asked.
“Sixty five vehicles,” Pehnke replied.
“What did you estimate as the total number of vehicles being occupied in that apartment building?” Shepherd asked. “How many vehicles do you think that that will generate, that that will house?”
“So we would expect, based upon the 85th percentile calculations, it’s the highest, it’s literally what you see in the peak design volume, just over 300 vehicles a month, 318,” Pehnke said.
“We’re talking about real life,” Board member Joel Reiss said. “So wouldn’t it be more accurate for residential traffic to monitor the traffic from all the residential buildings off JFK to see where those people go, how many people leave their home, at what time? You’re guessing at it.”
“No, we’re not guessing,” Pehnke said. “As I said, the database that we are using is actual traffic data. It’s a database of actual traffic. It’s not a guess.”
“We do that by a demographic analysis of journey of work, where people that live in the town generally work; you also look at the existing traffic patterns and you use that to evaluate where traffic would go to and from,” he said. “And all of this data is available to your professional to review. This is not anything that’s not done every day by transportation plans.”
Pehnke said that incorporating the new McDonald’s restaurant on the property and the apartment building, the driveways onto Easton Avenue would continue to operate at their current, mid-range level during all peak traffic hours, but drivers making a left onto JFK Boulevard in the evening peak hours would continue to experience delays.
It’s that situation that led CME to suggest the traffic signal study, Pehnke said.
The next hearing on this application will be at 6:30 p.m. on September 19 in the Council chamber, when the Board is scheduled to hear about the project’s demographic data..
