Statement of Carolyn S. Konheim
Community Consulting Services
August 23, 2006

New information should send Atlantic Yard DEIS back to the drawing board

1) This DEIS process is premature and must be remedied by a Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

    a. CCS’s detailed review of over 1,000 pages on traffic, transit and pedestrians reveals that the DEIS has stripped out at least 30 types of essential data, without which the reader is asked to accept the DEIS conclusions on faith. Requested documents have just been received and have been found to have major discrepancies with the DEIS and to be missing key elements needed to verify the impacts.

    b. As was done when crucial data in the review of the Brooklyn Bridge Park DEIS were belatedly released, the comment period for this DEIS must be extended. And as was done with the Downtown Brooklyn Rezoning DEIS, when it was acknowledged that major other development had been omitted and the transit methodology was inadequate, a supplemental DEIS must be prepared. This is provided under State Environmental Quality Review regulations that govern the Empire State Development Corporation, 6 NYCRR:

The lead agency may require a supplemental EIS, limited to the specific significant adverse environmental impacts not addressed or inadequately addressed in the EIS that arise from: (b) newly discovered information.”

2) The most significant newly discovered information is that a traffic simulation model of the study area network has been prepared to evaluate proposed mitigation but has not been released.

This contradicts the consultants’ long standing insistence that use of such a model is not allowable for City Environmental Quality Review.

NYCDOT’s head of environmental review agrees that the model, as part of the DEIS, should be made public, but that would have to be done by ESDC as the lead agency.

    a. The model is exactly the tool that the community strenuously urged be used as the basic traffic analytic method in the DEIS to provide a more realistic assessment of impacts than the standard simplistic calculations of delay at isolated intersections. That request was denied on the now-belied claim that the model was not permitted under CEQR.

    b. Omission of the more comprehensive and more informative model as part of the DEIS is an extreme example of non-disclosure. ESDC can remedy this grievous omission of data central to a credible DEIS by responding promptly to the request for the models e-mailed to ESDC on August 10, 2006 and by extending the review period and preparing a Supplemental DEIS so the new data are subject to full public scrutiny.

    c. The more accurate impacts depicted in the model cannot be withheld. CCS’s version of the traffic simulation model, using officially-approved traffic volumes, shows that even without Atlantic Yards, the entire Downtown Brooklyn network and the BQE are gridlocked. Atlantic Yards just makes it extend further into Brooklyn and last longer. An areawide simulation of the way traffic really behaves would depict the domino effect of 10 minute delays that are now buried in the fine print in the DEIS appendices

3) The second newly discovered information is that the traffic mitigation plan in the DEIS, which rests primarily on signal timing changes, had not been reviewed by NYCDOT’s director of signal timing*, who normally thoroughly examines and approves proposed changes before a DEIS is released. Since my mid-August call sounded the alarm, he may have become involved, but the resulting plan is likely very different from what is in the DEIS. The reported continuing process of refining planned street closures, diversion routes through neighborhood streets and the fine tuning of signals cannot be deferred to the FEIS; the proposal must be subject to public scrutiny.

4) The third newly discovered information just received from ESDC confirms that the projected development in 2016 is much greater than reported in the DEIS (Table 2-1). The impact of this on subway crowding, for example, is huge. When background growth of subway riders is properly accounted for, 9 of the 12 lines serving the site will operate with severe “crush loads” at peak hours —a far cry from the DEIS conclusion that no added peak hour service is needed for 83,000 daily riders added by the project.

Since the justification for the site’s unparalleled density is the confluence of 12 subway lines, we’d better know now if we have to invest billions more to make them work. And we need to know if those funds could be generated by tolls—the only reliable traffic mitigation.

*Woo Yan, Director of Signal Timing, telecommunication with C. Konheim, August 10, 2006