37 - The Increase in Traffic at 212 and Playhouse Lane

I forgot to add one thing about Creighton Manning's letter, the one submitted to the Woodstock Planning Board, about my public hearing (Jan. 14) comments on RUPCO's project.

Creighton Manning writes: "The speculation that the Woodstock Commons project related traffic will make the area of Playhouse Lane and Route 212 more hazardous can be hypothesized in connection with any amount of traffic added from residential or commercial projects, special events, the influx of weekend tourist, or even the commute of existing residents between work and home."

This sentence is idiotic and simply false. What it basically says is that there are many other causes for this intersection to experience more traffic. While this is true, the problematic traffic is not through traffic, but traffic that involves other than a straight trip through the intersection.

RUPCO's project would, according to their estimates, generate an added 420+ car trips per day, into and out of Playhouse Lane. There is NO other event or development that would result in that much added (and hazardous) traffic in that intersection.

The land upon which RUPCO wants to build could never accommodate 53 houses, not without RUPCO's special use permit. It would not even accommodate half that many houses, even if all of the land was built on, and all of the land cannot be built on because it is wetlands.

As for arguing that commuters will generate more traffic, how many trips can each of the 20 houses back there generate? Is Creighton Manning suggesting that this little neighborhood's residents, each and every one of them, will increase their commuting trips from one or two or three to twenty plus per day? Not unless we all go into the taxi business.

And how about events and weekend traffic? It would take a whole lot of events at the playhouse to increase car trips up Playhouse Lane by about 1500 per weekend day, every weekend of the year.

Creighton Manning's line of reasoning about traffic causality is colossally incompetent. But I'll say this much: it more or less matches their competence in the area of counting and reporting cars in an intersection.