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.

We’ll continue to 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.)

Maidencreek Township is not required to use the average ITE numbers. They should be requesting the Higher ITE numbers

The Institute of Traffic Engineers (ITE) looks at gross floor area of proposed properties when calculating averages and truck-trips, which does not take into account the vertical size of the building: this is important because objects are clearly stacked higher than floor-level, and it stands to reason that more trucks would be required to move and distribute those products.

Per the McMahon Transportation Impact Study, they are using the average rate of 214 trucks and 1,472 cars, for a total of 1,686 vehicles.

We found documentation from Lehigh Valley Planning Commission that shows the issue with this average (linked here) as applied to warehouses:

“The ITE manual calculates traffic based only on gross floor area (GFA), a reflection of traditional Warehouse footprints, which may not necessarily reflect the impacts of structures with storage capacity of 100 vertical feet or more. In essence, by measuring only floor area ITE treats a 24-foot-tall building with a floor area of 200,000 square feet the same as it treats a 100-foot-tall building with 200,000 square feet of floor area. In reality, the 100-foot-tall high cube or automated Warehouse building is akin to stacking four traditional Warehouses on top of each other.”

We are steadfast that the ITE should using Cubic Feet and not Gross Floor Area to calculate truck-trip traffic.

Back to the study: if you used the HIGH END of the range in their traffic studies (.89 for truck trip-ends), you would have 828 trips which is 287% higher than average. And yet this is what they presented on the record.

Any kind of community impact study should require the HIGHER LIMIT of projections so as to account for the fullest possible spectrum of outcomes. To do otherwise is purposefully misleading, and downplays the actual expected impact of such a warehouse in our community.