Top Ten Mistakes Developers Make with Traffic Issues

1. Assuming you can get a driveway or curb cut wherever you want.
2. Assuming you'll get a traffic signal at your development's main intersection.
3. Assuming a government agency will pay for the infrastructure (signals, turn lanes, medians, etc.) needed to get traffic smoothly in and out of your development.
4. Ignoring the traffic concerns of your neighbors.
5. Assuming one of your consultants (architect, landscape architect, civil engineer, traffic engineer) is designing a site plan that will have good internal traffic circulation.
6. Assuming your traffic engineer is a good public speaker and will represent you well in public hearings.
7. Assuming a traffic study can be done in a few days.
8. Assuming all traffic engineers are good at developing a phased mitigation plan that will protect the motoring public while considering your bottom line.
9. Using a consultant traffic engineer that is not respected by the public agencies who will be reviewing their traffic study.
10. Assuming traffic studies are straight science - many assumptions go into a traffic study and politics are often involved with traffic issues (politicians rarely question the size of a recommended sewer pipe, but they often have an opinion on traffic recommendations).

Comments

[Jay]

Great list! A couple more egregious mistakes I've encountered to some degree:

"calling your traffic consultant after you've committed to building footprints"

or

"fretting excessively about whether 5 versus 10% of your traffic accesses the site via a particular direction, while completely overlooking how it distributes once on your private property"

[Mike]

Jay -
Great additions. I would love to turn this into a top twenty list of there are other thoughts out there.
Mike

[Brian]

You hit the nail on the list.

In reference to #5... Not having a traffic engineer involved in the site plan at all.

As far as I am concerned, all city's should require that all site plans be sealed by a traffic engineer in addition to the Site/Civil engineer.

Also trying to nickle and dime over pro-rata share while tying the project up for months.

-Brian