[NYguy]

http://www.silive.com/northshore/index.ssf/2013/05/post_63.html

Gridlock-busting plans laid for New York Wheel on Staten Island




By Jillian Jorgensen
May 24, 2013

The New York Wheel and Empire Outlets project would cause delays at 16 intersections on Staten Island — but developers say they’ll add lanes or update signal timing to keep things moving smoothly at all but three of them.

Harder to fix, however, will be a ferry logjam: Eighteen ferry trips are expected to run over their functional capacity once the Wheel is built.

“You can’t add this many people to the ferry service without having some concern,” New York Wheel CEO Rich Marin told the Advance earlier this week.

Those findings are part of the Draft Environmental Impact Survey that was completed earlier this month.

It lays out plans to mitigate traffic caused by the development at 13 intersections. But it notes that conditions at three others, the Richmond Terrace and Staten Island Ferry viaduct car lane, the bus lane there, and Richmond Terrace and Hamilton Avenue, will make it impossible to avoid an increased wait time.

And while developers can propose changes to keep most traffic moving, keeping ferryboats moving is another story.

The number of people trying to board certain boats is expected to be up to 1,593 passengers over the boat’s functional capacity — that is, how many people can be herded aboard in the 6.5 minutes before the boat is scheduled to leave, according to the impact survey.

The document offers three potential solutions — though it notes that even without the projects being built, the ferry is already slated to be over capacity during some sailings by 2016.

Since there are enough seats on the boats for even 1,593 extra passengers — it’s just a matter of being unable to board them quickly enough — one potential solution is increasing the width of the boarding aprons to get folks aboard faster. Ferries, too, would have to be modified to fit the slips.

“According to NYCDOT, this measure would take approximately 8 to 10 years to implement and would require significant capital investment,” the survey found.

Perhaps an easier fix — and one that has already been proposed by the Staten Island members of the City Council delegation — would be increasing the frequency of ferryboats. That would reduce the number of people on each boat, but it would require money to recruit and train more workers, according to the document.

Both developers expressed support for that idea earlier this week.