2007-03-02 TBILLS - Laserfiche WebLink

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have a delay in the implementation of the project until the public facilities got up to speed, up to a certain level of service. And I think what Ill do is, you know, there is a pretty extensive write-up on these bills, rather than repeat the write-up Ill just give a gist of each of the bills. Then I think we do have public testimony on this; and Id also be happy to take questions at the end of the talk Im giving right now or at the end of public testimony as well. Bill 318 applies to roads and water; and it applies at the stage of rezoning. Its not terribly specific about what the developer is supposed to do. It doesnt say who does the traffic study but it says that if the Level of Service is E or F that the Director shall make sure that there are strategies or improvements in place to mitigate the traffic problem before the occupancy of the development takes place. Just to say a little bit about Levels of Service, I hope I can remember to do this, but beforeyournextmeetingwellgiveyousomethingthatdefineslevelofserviceforroads. I think we gave a brief verbal description of this, but there are traffic manuals that talk about Levels of Service for roads going from A to F. Theyre defined differently from intersections, highways and freeways. For an intersection the Level of Service is defined as the delay that you have; or in terms of missed cycles, like if you stop at a stop light and then you dont get through on that cycle and you have to wait a cycle, then that puts you in a different level of service. For highways, its defined as the amount of time you spend following closely behind another car; and there are quantitative measures of how to get to this. And there can be some play in how a traffic engineer will define a Level of Service at a particular location, but its relatively objective. In Levels of Service, F is the worst; and F is essentially like gridlock where you have constant stop and go movement, you dont have any flow of movement. E is close to F, as E is also bad. D is slow, congested, but you do have movement. So, anyway, so Bill 318 applies at the rezoning stage and its something that would say that you would have this traffic study at the point of every rezoning. The revisions to 318 that the Department is proposing have a threshold. And rather than say that every rezoning would have to do this study, it applies more to the larger rezonings. And the threshold is a project that would generate 100 vehicle trips in the peak hour. This is not something we made up. This is the Institute of Traffic Engineers, Transportation Engineers rather, that suggests this as a threshold for when a local government should require a traffic study of a new development. And then it talks about traffic problems being either local or regional. An example of a local traffic problem would be if you have a shopping center and the traffic study says that the people turning out of the shopping center are going to have to wait a very long time to make the turns. Then the revised version of Bill 318 says that, as an ordinary thing, the developer should take care of the local mitigation; and that might be a thing like adding an additional turn lane out of the project or adding an additional lane on the highway immediately fronting the problem. The bigger issue really is when the traffic problem is regional, as it is in several areas of the island right now. Then the ordinance, Bill 318 on the Councils side as I said is a little vague as to what is supposed to happen at that point. The ordinance that were proposing says basically that you have to do something specific, like build a portion of 3EXHIBIT D