Sept. 20’s conditional use hearing marked the start of the community’s case against the proposed million-square-foot warehouse, and we will have a series of posts between now and the next meeting showing the concerning discrepancies in the developers’ application. We are steadfast that this project is a net negative for Maidencreek Township, and we will be transparent as to our reasoning.

Today: let’s look at the traffic report at the heart of the developers’ application. We have written at length about traffic concerns and the issues with the engineers’ sworn testimony — as well as our neighborhood’s inability to handle the rise in truck traffic — so let’s dig in further. (The developer’s “transportation impact study,” as entered into the record, can be found here.)

The traffic counts were purposefully done on the quietest days, in the quietest months

PennDOT uses the 30th highest hourly volume, which is the Design Hour Volume (DHV), to design highways. It shows Fridays followed by Wednesdays are the highest traffic days, not Tuesdays.

Furthermore, July and August are the highest travel months, not May and June. Yet the traffic engineering firm picked Tuesday May 17, 2022 and Tuesday June 7, 2022 for their observations; per numerous studies, Tuesdays are the lowest day of the week for traffic.

• Per PennDOT you can only do traffic counts on Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.  They picked the lowest of those three days. 
• Per PennDOT Traffic Data in 2022 Wednesday were the busiest of the three. In 2021 it was Thursdays. Regardless of what day (Wednesday or Thursday) it was considerably busier than Tuesday.
• Per a traffic engineer we talked with: companies that specialize and counting traffic are busiest on Tuesdays because all these developers traffic engineers want the lightest day of the week to get traffic counts.

So, you have a traffic impact study that’s not only completed on the quieter days of the week and quietest months of the year, but the roundabout projects were also incomplete. Construction on Rt. 222 wasn’t completed until September 23, 2022, and traffic volumes towards the end of the school year were noticeably LOWER than we can expect if the warehouse is approved for construction. People were avoiding the area and using alternate routes.