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"Probably the railroad crossing," said Vincent Nolan, who serves as the town's economic development coordinator. As part of his job, he said, he spends a great deal of time on the road. "I drive the community regularly two three times a week. I drive to Gaylordsville. I drive over to Roxbury. To see what's going on. To see what things are looking like," Mr. Nolan said.
"Railroad Street," said Department of Public Works Director Mike Zarba swiftly, and without hesitation.
All three officials were correct, according to the results of studies at the state Department of Transportation (DOT) measuring what are termed levels of service-with the traffic delays at the intersection of Railroad and Bridge streets ranking as badly as traffic delays can. Coming from the West, the traffic signal is the first encountered by traffic heading into the center of town from Route 7.
A measure of capacity, levels of service represents the flow of traffic at any intersection or section of roadway. According to Mr. Zarba, a level of service represents how long it takes traffic to move from one point to another. Levels of service range from A, which represents a delay of up to 10 seconds, to F, which represents a delay of greater than 80 seconds. Like a level of service E, a level of service ranked as F is one Mr. Zarba called "basically gridlock."
The delay on Railroad Street at its intersection with Bridge Street during the morning rush hour, according to Kevin Nursick, a spokesperson for the DOT, is a level E, which represents a wait of 55 to 80 seconds. During the evening rush hour, the delay sinks to F, or the longest wait in a traffic engineer's lexicon.
"In all reality, you want to operate at level C," Mr. Zarba explained. He said a level of service that held at A probably represented a roadway that was overdesigned.
"If there's one car on a highway traveling from Massachusetts to New York," said Mr. Zarba, who has completed level of service designs, "that's a level of service A. If cars are traveling at level of service C, all cars are traveling at or about optimum speed. The road's design capacity is being effectively utilized. You're spaced out the way you should be. If you [find yourself] in stop-and-go traffic, that's when your capacity at the time is not as efficient. The roadway is serving the capacity but it's not servicing the speed."
"Getting through it in one signal cycle, that's optimum in terms of capacity," he said of an intersection with a traffic signal, because the driver is getting through it in the time for which the roadway was designed. Waiting for the lights to change two or three times at an intersection, he said, would amount to a delay that is worse than a level C, which represents a wait of 20 to 35 seconds.
"Any lower than that," he said with reference to delays that represent levels of service E or F, "that's pretty well gridlock."
"The times it's the busiest-that's what you're designing around," said Mr. Zarba. "Normally you do 24-hour volume counts. Of course, you're designing around those peak hours. You usually design for the 85th percentile speed or 85th percentile volume. You take the worst case scenario," he said of the measurements of traffic flows.
Like the mayor, Mr. Zarba cited other areas of downtown congestion. He thought South Main Street had the second worst level of service in downtown New Milford, and, he put the traffic either where Grove Street joins Bridge and East streets-the site of the realignment project-in a tie with the traffic at Route 202 and Elm Street as locations where the third worst congestion occurs.
What can spark a level of service study, according to Mr. Nursick, is what the DOT terms major traffic generators. That would include developments of more than 100,000 square feet, such as a mall, as well as a parking lot that serves more than 200 cars, or even a change-such as the recent construction of a CVS on East Street-on an already well-traveled roadway.
Otherwise, he said, levels of service studies are sporadic.
"The levels of service [studies] are going to be sporadic," said the DOT's Mr. Nursack, when asked to cite the lowest level of service sections of roadway in the entire town. "We don't necessarily have them for every intersection or every piece of road. I think a lot of it revolves around the major traffic generators," he said, a fact with which John Carey, manager of traffic engineering for the DOT, agreed.
"It can be many things," he said of what triggers studies that demarcate levels of service or what traffic engineers term capacity analyses. "Typically, it's a request from a legal traffic authority to look at the timing of a traffic signal or to add a turning phase to a traffic light. Sometime, the local authority is citing a safety concern that will get us into the investigation of a timing phase of well. There are other causes, too."
So, for instance, the DOT said it has no level of service studies for the intersection of Route 202 and Elm Street, where, according to Mr. Carey, the left-hand turn signal was the product of safety concerns.
"The accident experience suggested the need for it," Mr. Carey said of the improvement.
Mr. Zarba said a lot of the cause for the Route 202-Elm Street pile-up is not because of the capacity of the roads, but rather because of a backup from the Grove Street intersection with Route 67 that will now be realigned. He said that, before the town reviews the accumulation of traffic at Route 202 and Elm Street, the town wanted to see how a completed Grove St. realignment would affect it.
"They've changed the light up there. They've accommodated a couple of turn units," he said of the traffic at the corner anchored by a burgeoning New Milford Hospital. The downside, he noted, is trying to get through the left-hand turn signal when a driver wishes to make a left-hand turn from Elm Street on to Route 202.
Although the DOT had no current level of service measurements for the intersection where the Grove Street realignment is slated to take place, Mayor Murphy, like Mr. Zarba, has high hopes that a realignment, which, according to DOT officials, was discussed as early as the 1970s, would ease the increasingly bedeviling traffic throughout the downtown traffic area.
"I do know traffic patterns," the mayor said. "Remember, traffic flow, parking, accidents, your emergency response, your access-if I don't know the roads I don't know how to operate my equipment. We're all downtown," she said.
"I think it's going to be really helpful," she said of the realignment. "It's such a dangerous situation," she observed of the Grove Street location now. "I avoid it by going around and over Route 7 ... . That's why Still River Drive has an intersection where they expect to peel off traffic rather than have it come up Route 7 . . . That's going to make a difference at the Railroad Crossing. The Grove Street project will peel off a lot of traffic," she said, suggesting that persons will come up Lanesville Road and drive over Grove Street, rather than head up Route 7 and, perhaps, over Bridge Street to the busy Railroad Street crossing. "To go to Roxbury, you're not going to come up Route 7," she observed.
"We're expecting it to balance traffic out in the area," Mr. Carey concurred.
"In the traffic engineering profession, we compare traffic to water," he said. "Water will seek the easiest route to flow. People, if they change their habits, will follow the Still River Connector/Grove Street Corridor," he said. "That will relieve pressure heading northeast."
Mr. Zarba agreed that levels of service function as just one measure in rating the sufficiency of a roadway. Accident history, severity of accidents, sightlines, the physical condition of a roadway-all are measures used to help traffic engineers rank in which order a roadway project, among the many on the state and a municipality's books, will be implemented.
The DOT's Mr. Nursick said that the Grove Street realignment project will, when completed, have a level of service B in the morning and a level C in the evening. That, he said, would improve the traffic at Railroad and Bridge streets, in part because of the reconfiguration of traffic lights that would occur as part of the project that will include the installation of a traffic signal.
According to Mr. Nursick, the intersection of Route 7 and Bridge Street just past Veterans Bridge, which one professional had ranked as the intersection with the longest delay downtown, had an acceptable level of service in the year 2000, when both morning and evening rush hours ranked at level C. The delay then ranged between 20 and 35 seconds.
By 2020, Mr. Nursick said, the service at the intersection there is expected to sink to the lowest levels of F and E, with a delay of greater than 80 seconds in the morning and a delay that would be just under that at night.
A Dec. 8 town meeting is scheduled on a $850,000 bond issue for the Grove Street and Route 67 alignment project, and Gov. M. Jodi Rell this week announced state bonding funds for the work.
