To the Editor:

I apologize in advance for writing about such a dry subject, but there is little opportunity to publicly address Newtown’s traffic issues in light of the zoning commission’s three-minute speaking time limit.

We all know that the amount of traffic on our roads is creating serious quality of life issues that are rapidly getting worse. Yet our Planning and Zoning Commission and Land Use Agency have spent their time chasing other “problems,” like defining warehouses and distribution centers and regulating food trucks, neither of which appear to relate to traffic issues.

The new Food Truck regulations control their location and numbers while they are off-road. Defining warehouses and distribution warehouses also ignores the traffic issue. While we now know how they differ (warehouses emphasize storage while distribution centers add some level of handling or processing) yet that difference won’t affect the traffic they generate. Both uses remain subject to the same zoning standards that applied to the recent Wharton application. So when the next application comes in, the outcome will turn on the user and its business mix rather than the principal uses the commission has defined.

Once approved as a distribution center, moreover, an occupant can change its business model to take advantage of newer technology and changing market opportunities without commission oversight. That is vitally important because the commission relies on the Institute of Traffic Engineers guidebook to estimate future traffic generation. The commission’s new definitions fail, however, to keep up with ITE’s methods, which now recognize some six different types of distributions centers (depending on the user’s business model) with widely different traffic generating expectations. The most intense type of use, for example, would be expected to generate ten times the traffic than would a warehouse — a distinction that the commission won’t have a regulatory basis on which to rely without creating different zoning standards for each sub-use.

The short answer is that our land use agencies cannot rely on the user or its current business model if they expect to have any real input into local traffic issues. State statutes limit the factors towns can use for control. Users’ business models are not among them. There are, however, factors that can be used as proxies for a user’s business mix over time. It can regulate building size, the number of loading and unloading facilities, the amount of parking, etc. Larger numbers seem like good stand-ins for traffic, although the number of employees will become less important with the advance of robotics in users’ operations.

The Newtown’s land use agencies might use their time addressing issues that will improve Newtown’s quality of life rather than dwelling on the fringes of land use policy.

Don Mitchell

Newtown