In recent months, the main topic of conversation in town has centered on proposed development at the Bottle King property. If the developer is permitted to go forward with the plan, there will be 240 rental units, in addition to retail stores, built on the property. Residents have brought up several concerns, one of which was increased traffic to an already congested area of town, along South Livingston Avenue and Mt. Pleasant Avenue.
These residents are correct, of course. Anyone who has driven that stretch of town during the busiest parts of the day are familiar with its problems. It can take several green lights just to cross Mt. Pleasant Avenue, as traffic regularly backs up for blocks. If someone tries to make a left turn off of South Livingston into a business or onto a side street, one of the two extremely narrow lanes on either side of the roadway quickly backs up. And making left turns onto South Livingston Avenue? Forget about it. Do not even try.
And yet, as the developer mentioned at a meeting concerning the project a few weeks ago, the area was designed to house a large and active retail corridor. Even with a completed housing complex operating at full capacity, the traffic that would result from it would be less than if the existing retail stores were also all operating to capacity. So, adding all of that housing would be within the limits of existing traffic regulations.
What this tells us is that it is time for those regulations to change. With all the development that will be coming to Livingston in the next decade-plus, our entire town needs an updated comprehensive traffic study to assess what is already an issue. If there is currently an area of town with traffic issues, it is possible, if not probable, that they will only get worse without intervention.
We need to extensively study not just the traffic in the area around the Bottle King development, but for the entire town, as major housing complexes will soon be built throughout. How will more housing along areas of Mt. Pleasant Avenue, the Livingston Mall, and several other sections affect our already strained roadways? The shopping district that formerly housed Bottle King, as well as the Livingston Mall property, have had countless business closures in recent years. For these specific areas, this likely masked the fact that traffic in our growing town has increased in recent years. If these areas go back to operating at full capacity, we need to be prepared for precisely how that will stress Livingston’s infrastructure and what we need to do about it.
Perhaps these new studies will lead to different traffic patterns, changing the timing of lights, and even – in some cases where it is viable – a few new roadways. Who knows, maybe it will turn out that one or two of these planned developments will no longer be feasible once updated traffic data is taken into account. Regardless of the outcome, every stone should be overturned before a shovel goes in the ground on any of these latest developments. The time to plan for increased traffic is before these projects are operational, so we are not reacting to a preventable crisis after the fact.
The good news is that while projects such as constructing new roads would take significant funds and time to complete, there do appear to be some changes that could be applied rather quickly. We need only to look at the intersection of McClellan Avenue and North Livingston Avenue for evidence. The intersection had been the site of dozens of crashes in recent years (seven this year, and 40 since the start of 2020) until multiple adjustments were made to the traffic light this past July. It took trial and error to find a pattern that worked, and the initial adjustments were not well received. But after a week or so of hiccups, the area has, anecdotally, never run more smoothly. Adding a delayed green arrow for one side has prevented traffic backup, and has limited crashes from people trying to jump the light to make a left turn.
That intersection is proof that, while we may not be able to (or want to, in most cases) tear down our limited green space to create new roads, there are changes that can be made to our existing traffic patterns to improve it.
New development – and many would surely say overdevelopment – is not going away. One of the most crucial things we as a town can do is be prepared for how it is going to further tax our already overstressed roadways and act accordingly.
