A series of tubes

Folks that are worried about traffic impacts like to quote Eugenie Thomson’s analysis that highlighted (and took out of context) one data point from the Alameda Point documents with regard to the one car in the Tube thing. The point of the Eugenie Thomson piece is to then glom on to this point to somehow render the complete traffic study invalid.

Despite staff, and by staff I mean Andrew Thomas, repeatedly attempting to correct that misconception, it still is out there in the Alameda universe as though it has some sort of weight or value. At last week’s City Council meeting, Frank Matarrese brought this up during the Site A discussion thusly:

The issue that keeps popping up is that there is only going to be one additional car going through the tube at peak time and whether or not that’s true or not, I don’t think it’s true, but we have to get some numbers that are bona fide to say what it’s like today so that we can project it out, what we have to mitigate as these units become populated.

Marilyn Ezzy-Ashcraft then asked staff to come up to explain this oft quoted factoid and Jennifer Ott came up to bat and in her matter of fact way explained what the traffic study said in plain language:

The Alameda Point Environmental Impact Report studied, I think, 32 intersections, the impacts to 32 intersections in Alameda and a number in Oakland as well and what it showed was that there will be, with or without Alameda Point, there are going to be significant impacts given all the regional growth.  Alameda Point adds their impacts that Alameda Point contributes to. There are significant impacts, no one is saying that there is one, that Alameda Point only generates one car, that’s just not right.

Absolutely it will be generating cars, what happens is, what that person…taking data what it shows is that it confirms in a lot of ways what we know already which is that the tube are essentially reaching capacity now.  When you add more cars what ends up happening — this is what you see in the analysis that was done — is when you add more cars on the West End people that are driving from the middle of the island or the East End don’t go into the tubes anymore the tubes are at capacity.  It’s what we would all do intuitively, they would now then go to intersections on the East End so where you actually see a lot of the impacts on the traffic in the traffic impact analysis is on the East End around the Park Street Bridge, around the other crossings because people who would be driving to into the tubes today, let’s say, as the regional growth occurs and as other growth occurs in Alameda the tubes are going to reach capacity.  What the model is saying is that your tubes only have so much traffic that can go in there so what you see is that you have spreading of traffic and traffic that’s diverting to other ends of the island. [emphasis added]