Saturday, December 17, 2016

How Many Trucks?

On Thursday, December 8, the Planning Board received an inch-thick document from Patrick Prendergast, the engineer for A. Colarusso & Sons, which was supposed to answer the many questions about the proposed haul road raised by Ray Jurkowski, the engineer retained by the Planning Board. The document is made up of years of completed forms, applications, and correspondence with various regulatory agencies, but it fails to provide a straightforward answer to the question on many people's minds: How many trucks will travel on the haul road from the quarry to the dock every day?

A call to action posted on Imby by Julie Metz warns that the haul road signals a "major expansion of the gravel operation that would add traffic and pollution to the waterfront area," but there is no way of knowing if this dire prediction is true, or if, as J. R. Heffner has stated, Colarusso is pursuing the haul road simply to shorten the route from the quarry to the dock and to get trucks off our city streetsThe Project Narrative in the inch-thick document states: "For each barge to be loaded approximately 100 truck loads of stone would make the trip. This would normally occur over three to four days." Later on in the document, a traffic study prepared by Creighton Manning cites some significantly higher numbers: "The project is estimated to generate an average of four truck trips during a typical hour that will cross both US Route 9 and NY Route 9G. During worst-case conditions, a maximum of 24 trucks trips will cross both US Route 9 and NY Route 9G during a one hour period."

You can peruse the document yourself and see if you can find a definitive answer about the anticipated industrial traffic to the waterfront. It is now available on the City website, and you can access it by clicking here.
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5 comments:

  1. On Friday I was at the waterfront as a passenger train was loading at the station. Meanwhile, dump trucks were parked at the Ferry St. rail crossing, waiting for the gate to lift so they could proceed. 28 trains per day pass thru Hudson each day, so it doesn't require much imagination to realize that we're going to have a mess down there if the Colarusso scheme is allowed to go forward. All of this can be laid at the feet of the Common Council members, who failed our community miserably when they passed a deeply flawed LWRP and the associated zoning changes. The good news is that the state of NY has not approved the LWRP yet, so perhaps we can salvage things and get a better outcome. I see absolutely no economic upside for Hudson in this situation, and a whole lot of downside.

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    1. "All of this can be laid at the feet of the Common Council members, who failed our community miserably when they passed a deeply flawed LWRP and the associated zoning changes."

      Here, here.

      (To be precise, we're referring to nearly every Alderman who served between 2006 and 2011, with a few important exceptions.)

      But it's not that there were no advances made in the zoning, and that the waterfront wasn't better protected as a result. Though flawed, the crucial disaster is that the 2011 "LWRP zoning" is not enforced by the City, at least not where A. Colarusso & Son, Inc. is concerned.

      Only five years since it was amended, it makes no difference whether the zoning was perfect or flawed if it's not applied. Taxpayers bought a very expensive deadbolt for a door the City leaves unlocked.

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  4. Looking through this document, the maximum is 2 barges a day with 284 truck trips a day which is 1420 trips a week. That is a serious increase and far more than what Broad Street and the Waterfront Park can handle. Trying to jam this through the city is not acceptable, surprised we are just seeeing all this information now.

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