By 2022, the Greenway committee’s engineering firm, VHB, was claiming, with no evidence, that the street’s traffic level was about 2,000 cars per day and using this as a reason why bicycles sharing the road with cars was a bad idea. In a 2023 meeting with Greenway committee members, we objected to this 2,000 cars per day figure and were told that Fuss & O’Neill’s measurement was old data, that “you can’t expect a blood pressure reading taken when you’re young to indicate your blood pressure when you’re old.” In response, we found the Mass. Dept. of Transportation’s Traffic Count Data System and discovered that the DOT had measured traffic levels on Bridge Street, which, until the recent bridge closing, carried most of the traffic from South Main St. over to Route 9. They reported 699 cars per day on Bridge St. in 2015, and 696 cars per day in 2022, a very slight decrease — so there would appear to be no reason to expect traffic levels on South Main St. to have increased significantly since Fuss & O’Neill’s 2015 measurement.
Quarter-hour subtotals, trucks noted
Our final tally of vehicles passing in front of 26 South Main Street between 4 and 5 PM was as follows:
1/29 1/30 1/31 2/1 2/2
Mon Tue Wed Thur Fri Avg
Southbound: 32 39 35 33 36 35
Northbound: 40 32 42 37 36 37.4
Total: 72 71 77 70 72 72.4
The weekday average of 72.4 cars per hour is about 10% less than Fuss & O’Neill’s 2015 measurement, confirming the DOT assessment that traffic
levels have decreased since 2015.Moreover, speed humps, which are part of both the Greenway and neighborhood’s proposals, can be expected to reduce traffic volume even further, by about 20%. (See Impacts of Traffic Calming, page 7, and Effects of Traffic Calming Measures on Motor Vehicle Speed and Volume, from the Federal Highway Administration.) Thus the peak per-hour traffic volume on South Main might wind up being about 58 vehicles per hour in both directions combined, or about 29 per hour each way.
Next, we were told by Greenway members that the count of vehicles is not the important thing, it’s the mix of cars versus trucks — that Valley View Farm had started since 2015 and that between them and Moran’s heating & cooling business, there was a large amount of truck traffic on South Main Street. So we contacted both Jim Moran and David Nehring about truck traffic to their businesses and got the following figures: from Moran, about 15 trucks per week between MJM and Western Mass Heating & Cooling, and from Nehring, 5-8 trucks per week for Valley View Farm, plus 2-3 buses per day on Friday, Saturday & Sunday, June-Nov. Taking the upper bounds, 15+8+(3*3) = 32 trucks per week. Each truck has to arrive and depart, giving 64 truck passages per week. This works out to about 9 trucks per day, which is a little over 1% of traffic volume and amounts to about one truck per hour on the street. (For perspective, 6% of daytime traffic on Route 9 is trucks, per MassDOT Traffic Count System records.) Moreover, once the bridges are rebuilt, most truck traffic will stay off South Main: Moran has driveways opposite each bridge, and only incoming Valley View trucks will use the section of the street between the bridges.
There would appear to be no evidence for regarding South Main as being unsuitable for use as a bike boulevard either because of traffic volume or the amount of truck traffic on the street.