Originally Posted by KevinFromTexas
You can do daily traffic counts now for roads in Google Earth Pro. They used to charge for Google Earth Pro, but it's free now. Anyway, the four streets that surround this property are:
I-35 access: 24,000 cars per day (last count 2005)
East 11th Street: 11,803 (2012)
East 12th Street: 10,559 (2012)
Branch Street: 401 (2012)
So I would imagine their 10,000 trips per day for the project is grossly overestimated. I know there isn't a lot in that neighborhood to begin with, but to suggest that one single development will be 100% of all the traffic in the neighborhood on 2 streets, and 50% of the traffic on another is clearly not accurate.
Taking further things into consideration with another feature Google Earth Pro has now, is to show you the census tract populations of a neighborhood. So the population of the tract where this property is is 1,397.
This project will have 472 units. Let's assume every resident in the development is married. That's a fair assumption, though, not definite. So that's 944 new residents. However, it's likely that most of the people living there will only have one car at best. So let's say that even if 70% of the estimated 944 residents living there own a car, that comes to 660.8 cars. Even if each resident were to make 3 trips a day, that would still only be 1,983 trips.
By the way, if the 1,397 residents who currently live in that census tract make three trips per day, it comes to 4,191. That's assuming each one of them has their own car. If you assume that 70% of them have a car the number drops to 2,934.
So that's 4,917 car trips per day for this project and that whole census tract, assuming 70% of the residents of both drive a car 3 times a day.
By the way, something else to consider that I didn't bother with, those census tract totals are for every age level. So I doubt there's any 9 year olds driving around in those neighborhoods. So that drops the numbers even lower, in addition to the elderly who rarely drive either.
Most of the traffic from this new development will exit the neighborhood and use I-35, as well as East 11th and 12th into downtown. Very little of the traffic will likely venture into the neighborhood since almost everything east of this development is residential only.
The grocery store will likely be the one thing that adds the most traffic, but if it does, then you can say the area residents appreciate it and find it convenient. So they'd be shooting themselves in the foot not to support it. And it's not like it's going to attract outsiders to the area. I mean, I already have grocery stores in my neighborhood, i really don't need to drive 5 miles away to another one. Even for downtown residents on the west side of downtown, they'll likely go on using Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Blue Royal.
As for the tree statement about the shade, that's bunk. I hope the developers do a shadow study based on the seasonal positions of the sun and call in an arborist to disprove it.
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