Traffic Consultant: Jets Stadium Would Mire West Side in Gridlock

Gridlock will reach from SoHo to 70th Street during evening rush hours, and for two hours after Jets games end on Sunday afternoons, if a stadium is built in the Hudson Yards, a traffic engineer said yesterday.Lambasting the city’s plan for a football stadium on the West Side, the engineer, Jeffrey Greene, of Philadelphia based Orth-Rodgers & Associates, said that if the project is given the go-ahead, then congestion will extend from Battery Park to the George Washington Bridge, and from the East River crossings to the Hudson River.Orth-Rodgers is a paid consultant of Cablevision’s Madison Square Garden, which has spent approximately $10 million to oppose the football stadium. The plan’s leading advocates are the Bloomberg administration and the Jets. Mayor Bloomberg sees the New York Sports and Convention Center, his name for the stadium, as the linchpin of the city’s bid to be host of the 2012 Olympics, and as a key element of a sweeping plan for developing 59 square blocks of the far West Side. The next step in the process will take place in January, when the City Council is expected to vote on the rezoning of the Hudson Yards neighborhood.“If the Jets’ game is at 1 p.m., anyone looking to park after that to go to the theater, Madison Square Garden, the Javits Center, or to Times Square is going to be simply out of luck,” Mr. Greene told a crowd of urban planners at a daylong conference on the draft generic environmental impact statement on the Hudson Yards plan. “What’s worse, many cars will be circulating on the streets trying to find a place to park, adding to the gridlock.”“At this point, Cablevision’s lack of credibility is laughable,” said a spokeswoman for the jets, Marissa Shorenstein.Mr. Greene, in the study by Orth-Rodgers that was submitted to the Department of City Planning and in his comments yesterday, expressed a number of differences with the city’s plan. For example, the firm estimates that as few as 30% of those traveling to the games would use mass transit, rather than the 70% estimated by the city. Further, the firm argues that the planned extension of the No. 7 train cannot be completed for years after the stadium goes into operation in 2009.The firm also takes issue with the way the city studied traffic congestion for the environmental statement. Rather than examine the traffic system as a whole, taking into consideration how one traffic jam could affect nearby intersections, the city examined individual street junctions separately.“If one intersection is delayed, it impacts the neighboring intersection and so on, and this cascading affect was never studied by the city,” Mr. Greene said.During a Sunday event at the Sports and Convention Center, 30 of the 40 intersections would have delays of five minutes, with 13 intersections facing even longer delays, he said. Weekday rush hours will lead to 106 intersections with 5-minute delays, with 14 delayed for longer, Mr. Greene projected.“At locations with chronic queuing problems ‘DON’T BLOCK THE BOX’ pavement marking would be installed and increased point penalties would be enforced in order to keep intersections clear and permit cross-stream traffic to flow,” the city wrote in its final generic environmental impact statement, in response to those criticisms by Mr. Greene’s study. The city also pledged to deploy 20 traffic-control agents during days when the Jets stadium is in use, and partially close West 30th and 33rd streets to expedite traffic flows.Orth-Rodgers also takes issue with the city on how many people will travel per car to the stadium. While the city estimates three people per vehicle, Mr. Greene puts that number at 2.5.“We looked at a number of examples and could not find one where three people traveled per car,” Mr. Greene said, adding that Madison Square Garden has the highest figure, with 2.76 people to a car, while Jets games at the Meadowlands Arena have 2.2 people on average to a car. “Based on our survey, we believe 2.5 people is attainable,” he said.The city estimates there will be 7,500 cars driving to the stadium for a game, and Orth-Rodgers puts the number of cars driving to the proposed Jets stadium as closer to 17,400 vehicles. At 2.5 people to a car, it translates into 58% of ticket-holders driving to the stadium, and only 42% taking mass transit – once the extension of the No. 7 line west from Times Square is finished.The large influx of private vehicles will exacerbate the already heavy demand for parking in the area. With a base demand for parking of 16,001 spots, an additional 2,917 spots needed for visitors to the Javits Center, 2,939 for Madison Square Garden, and 17,400 cars to the Jets Stadium, total parking demand on game day at the Jets stadium would be 39,257, according to the projections by Madison Square Garden’s consultants.Within a half-mile radius of the Jets stadium, there would be a total of 28,977 spaces. That would put increase demand for an additional 10,280 parking spaces to as far downtown as Lower Manhattan and as far uptown as the 70s, Mr. Greene said.

Traffic Consultant: Jets Stadium Would Mire West Side in Gridlock

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