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General News: Study Looks to Avoid Future Traffic Jams
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| Local residents looked a maps and proposed alternative routes during the roundtable. |
March 04, 2011
Can the greater Newburgh area avoid a future of clogged roads and rush hour gridlock as it continues to grow over the next decades? This was the topic of a roundtable discussion on Tuesday evening attended by some 50 Newburgh area residents who came to give their input on how to avoid a future traffic nightmare.
The roundtable is one in a series organized by the Newburgh Area Transportation & Land Use Study, a group composed of the Orange County Planning Department and consultants who are developing a regional plan for managing growth and infrastructure needs. Other discussions have been held in Montgomery and Cornwall covering topics of public transit service and non-motorized transportation, like bicycles and pedestrians.
At Tuesday’s roundtable, Graham Trelstad, a consultant with AFRK, Inc., talked about how traffic flow and safety could be improved at some key locations by building “complete streets,” where good planning could allow cars, bikes, trucks and buses to share the same roadway.
Trelstad also showed a map that projected heavy demands on key roads – Route 300, Route 17K, Route 9W in Cornwall and Route 208 in Montgomery are among the hot spots that the study has identified. He said the study may recommend low-level investments to address these problem areas and noted that maintaining the environmental integrity of the area is key to their work. Funding will have to found to carry out the projects, he said.
The pattern of development in suburban areas of Newburgh and surrounding communities during the past twenty years has contributed to the growing congestion, according to David Kooris, a transit consultant with the Regional Plan Association. Kooris described what he called “lollipop” housing developments where a network of small streets and cul-de-sacs all pour out into one or two main thoroughfares. In the past, he said, people had more options for getting from point A to point B, but the ‘lollipop” design skips a level of connectivity that older communities have.
After hearing from the study leaders, people at the roundtable broke into groups where they could look at maps of the roads in their neighborhoods and pinpoint problems. Residents were asked to suggest how new routes could be opened up that would parallel congested roadways and the ideas started flying.
The facilitators listened and made notes, promising to review all the proposals to see what makes the most sense for the area’s future transportation needs. “How we spend money and how we prioritize (is important) so that we can be smart about it,”said John Czamanske, deputy commissioner of the Orange County Planning Department, referring to the dwindling resources available for infrastructure work. “We could build roads until we are blue in the face, but that is not necessarily going to solve our problems,” concluded David Kooris.
To learn more about the transportation and land use study visit www.newburghareastudy.info/.
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