News

May 7, 2001

But planner David Saladino told the council before it agreed on a congestion management system at its meeting on May 3 that expanding capacity should be a last resort. Although such a "quick fix" might often seem desirable at specific locations, "additional capacity may actually be adding to the problem," according to a staff report he presented at the meeting.

Before that, the report recommends, efforts should be made to reduce the amount of peak-hour driving, shift commuting

 that the report and its recommendations are intended to be "information and a resource [for] agencies that have to go out and address the problem." More specifically, he said in the interview that the planning council will advocate the various recommended steps in its dealings with Delaware Department of Transportation and New Castle County Department of Land Use.

The council's study was in response to a mandate in the federal Transportation Equity Act that states develop and implement a congestion management system for every urban area with a population of more than 200,000 as part of their metropolitan area planning process. The local council has jurisdiction in New Castle County and adjacent Cecil County, Md.

Saladino said that all the intersections and highway segments in the report are in New Castle because that is where data on which to base the study was available. The Maryland County will be included next year in the first of what are intended to be annual updates.

As it happened, the study came as New Castle County Council was involved in a traffic-congestion study of its own. Councilwoman Karen Venezky said her small business committee was concerned with addressing intersection congestion in light of its impact on smaller development projects. Acting alone, small firms cannot remedy so called 'failing' intersections but they adversely affect those firms' plans to expand facilities.

With reference to the congested highway segments, the report noted that there are planning studies underway or actual projects scheduled that are expected to deal, at least partly, with congestion.

Beyond that, she said, "people feel their quality of life has been compromised by the volume of traffic."

Therein, of course, lies something of a delemma since traffic congestion is largely in the mind of the beholder. "It's very subjective. Congestion in Delaware isn't anything like what you would find in other places," Ralph Reeb, who represented Delaware Department of Transportation at the meeting, noted.

The planning council approach was to blend highway planners' level-of-service classification system with a measure based on the average vehcile speed as a percentage of the posted speed limit. The former grades intersections 'A' to 'F' depending how long it takes to get through them at a given time of day, but like the comparable academic grade, an 'F'-for-failure could be only a few seconds away from passing or several minutes.

Saladino explained that measuring conditions along a highway segment by average speed rather than time is valid becuase "we assume that congestion is the reason they're not driving at or above the speed limit."

In the report, the council's lists of congested intersections and highway segments overlapped. The segments all incuded two or more of the intersections.

The planning council also reduced the County Council committee's list of 59 bad intersectins to 32 to reflect improvements recently made or in process. But it added 10 to the list on the basis of more recent traffic studies. Also dropped was the committee's ranking of the severity of the problems at each of the crossings, but that information was included as an appendix to the report.

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