Environmentalist questions Pabst Farms traffic count

Published: July 7, 2009
Tags: air-quality permit, Department of Natural Resources, Midwest Environmental Advocates Inc., Pabst Farms Town Centre

Sean Ryan
sean.ryan@dailyreporter.com

An environmental group is opposing a state air-quality permit for the Pabst Farms Town Centre because the developer has not announced which stores will be in the mall.

The development requires Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources permission for the pollution from visitors’ cars. The state on Monday stopped accepting public comments on a draft permit that would approve the project.

But the DNR cannot accurately predict how many visitors will drive to the 121-acre Town Centre and from how far away until the agency knows which stores will be in the mall, said Melissa Scanlan, founder and senior counsel of Midwest Environmental Advocates Inc. The organization submitted one of two comments about the permit.

“Why is the DNR acting prematurely?” she said. “They can’t make a reasoned environmental analysis until they know what the project is going to look like.”

Traffic predictions for the permit are based on the anticipated 1.07 million square feet of retail building space, said Mike Friedlander, DNR transportation and air-quality planner. The square footage is plugged into a trip generation table, which is a traffic prediction system used by government agencies since the 1970s.

“Getting into a level of specificity on the style of the project is not going to alter the outcome of the modeling,” Friedlander said.

The trip generation table does more than just multiply a number against square footage, said Tom Brahms, executive director and CEO of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the Washington, D.C.-based group that created the modeling system. Using data collected from engineering firms during the past 30 years, the system can incorporate calculations of how many residents will drive from one store in a mall to another or whether people on a nearby road will visit the mall because they saw it while driving by, he said.

The system does not predict traffic down to the individual vehicle, Brahms said, but gives a range of traffic counts. It has held up in court challenges by developers contesting impact fees for traffic on their projects and in studies to test accuracy of past predictions, he said.

“It’s been vetted in public hearings,” Brahms said. “It’s been vetted by public agencies reviewing those projects.”

Scanlan said she is not familiar enough with the modeling system to say whether it is the best way to predict traffic in a new development. However, she said, the state cannot know if the Pabst Town Centre will be a regional mall that attracts residents from surrounding communities until the DNR knows what the mall will offer.

“You need to know the use,” Scanlan said, “because that will determine whether or not they will be attracting people locally or regionally to the shopping center.”

Although the traffic predictor isn’t completely accurate, it is reliable enough to get planners in the ballpark, said Thomas Boyke, project engineer at the Waukesha office of Ruekert & Mielke Inc. He said in his more than seven years in the business, he has never seen a prediction based on the model end up completely wrong.

“You are not looking for an exact 53 cars,” he said. “It is more for planning purposes, which is going to be general.”

Friedlander said the DNR will consider the comments before deciding whether to issue a final permit for the project.

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