Portion Road Visioning Update
Aug 01, 2005
Access Management
The
final plans for Portion Road are still being
developed by the Suffolk County Department of Public
Works engineers. The process is not moving as quickly
as we had hoped it would when the Visioning Meetings
with the community were held back in October
2004.
The issue is still how to balance the need to move a
large amount of traffic along Portion Road and at the
same time maintain the road as a community road
without turning it into a wide, high-speed road. The
engineers are trying to resolve the volume and
capacity issues for the section of Portion Road west
of Holbrook without going to a full five-lane
widening. There seems to be general agreement that
the road will be three lanes wide east of Holbrook
Road with one lane in each direction and a center
lane to be used for left turns.
Besides working with
the County on the roadway layout, the Civic has also
been working closely with the Town of Brookhaven and
several of the developers of the properties along the
road, since good land use and development is directly
related to the requirements of the road that the
customers will be using to access the business being
built. We had discussions with the developers of the
Stop and Shop site in the past and most recently have
had extensive meetings and discussions about the new
Dunkin Donuts that is planned for the vacant site in
front of the Green Point Bank between Ronkonkoma and
Hawkins Avenues. In both cases we have encouraged the
developers to follow the principles of Smart Growth
and utilize good access management when designing
their sites and locating their entry and exit
driveways. The formal concept of Access Management is
relatively new and can be defined as follows:
A
process that provides or manages access to land
development while simultaneously preserving the flow
of traffic on the surrounding road system in terms of
safety, capacity, and speed. Access management is
pursued through the design and control of driveways,
curb cuts, turning movements, interior circulation of
parking lots, and public street connections and
intersections. Usually, major urban and suburban
arterial streets are the targets of access management
projects. Available research indicates that
application of access management principles can have
a significant and positive impact on the functioning
of highways and other arterial roadways. Improved
functioning can be measured in terms of roadway
capacity, level of traffic service provided, delays,
or travel time/speed.
This is a formal definition
that came from one of many research papers written on
the subject. It means that instead of each
development site having its own private in and out
driveways that are often unsafe, poorly located, and
disrupt the traffic flow of the adjacent road, access
should be planned and designed to meet the overall
needs of the community and the traveling public. Some
elements of good Access Management
are:
- Limit the numbers of driveway cuts along a road.
- Require businesses to share the same access point from the main road.
- Require businesses to connect their parking lots and internal roadways so customers can travel between stores without traveling back onto the main road.
- Locate access points at existing signalized intersections.
- Restrict unsignalized exit movements to right turns and require left turns to be made be made at signalized access points.
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