Can BDG Make Delivery Trucks Disappear? Why the Delivery Estimates for the Cleveland Circle Project Just Don’t Add Up

There is an emerging consensus that the enclosed, interior courtyard of BDG’s new mega-complex is badly designed and unworkable as proposed.  One important question is the way this space mixes pedestrian, hotel, residential, office and restaurant traffic with trucks, service vehicles and deliveries throughout the day.  BDG has addressed this question by stating that despite the enormous size of the project, there will be a very limited number of truck deliveries. On page 2-50 of their Project Notification Form (PNF) BDG provides the following table regarding weekday delivery activity by land use:

Table 1: Delivery Activity by Land Use

Just on the face of it, there is something wrong with the numbers in this table.  The Residential complex is projected to have only 1 daily delivery. That would be the U.S. Post Office truck delivering mail.  That means the residents in the 82 rental apartments don’t ever have anything delivered by FedEx, UPS or DHL.  They don’t order anything from Amazon.  They don’t send out their dry cleaning.  They don’t get home deliveries from Staples or W.H. Mason.  They never have furniture delivered.  They never move in or move out.  I can’t imagine what kind of residents these might be, but it’s clear that 1 daily delivery is an inaccurate, lowball estimate.  Here’s a picture of truck and vehicle activity at the front entrance of the Watermark building on a not-unusual morning last week.  Coincidently, the Watermark has 81 units compared to BDG’s proposed 82 unit building.

Watermark Building Doesn’t Hide Its Many Daily Truck Deliveries

How to Make Truck Deliveries Disappear (Hint –Forget to Multiply)

The document BDG cites for their daily delivery numbers is Truck Trip Generation Data –Synthesis 298, NCHRP, Transportation Research Board, Washington D.C. 2001.  Happily, this document is available for free on the web.  One of the findings of that report is as follows:

“The readily available truck trip generation data for transportation engineering applications are very limited, focusing on only a few specialized land uses (primarily ports, specialized manufacturing facilities, distribution warehouses, and industrial parks) and are often based on data collected from only a handful of facilities.’’

There are nevertheless three tables in the report that contain data relevant to BDG’s Daily Delivery table. All three tables are in Appendix C.  The tables are C-1A, C-1B, and C-1C.   (There are other tables of data but they cover industrial parks, truck terminals, and “air, rail, water and port’’ transportation systems.) For readers who want to dig into the details, the full tables are included in an Appendix at the end of this article.

Table C-1A is from a 1992 urban goods movement study in Australia.  Table C-1B is from a 1987 study done by the Department of Planning in Baltimore.  C-1C is a 1993 truck and taxi survey done in Tampa, Florida.  How any of this is relevant to Boston in 2012 is beyond me.  But let’s push on.

Application of NCHRP Data to Cleveland Circle Project: The Missing Trucks

From the three relevant tables in the NCHRP report we can extract the rows that might conceivably be applied to the land use in the Cleveland Circle Project.  This is done in Table 2.

Table 2: NCHRP Truck Trip Generation Data Applied to Cleveland Circle Project

The first thing we notice is that neither Hotel nor Residential land uses is covered in the NCHRP report.  Where BDG’s number delivery trip numbers came for these land uses is anybody’s guess.

The second thing to notice is that all the numbers except the last one are given in trucks per square foot.  They aren’t absolute numbers.  It starts to look as if BDG forgot to multiply.  Table 3 does the missing multiplication for them.

Table 3: Application of NCHRP Data to Cleveland Circle Project

Averaging out the NCHRP estimates and comparing the result with the BDG table we have:

Table 4: Comparison of BDG and NCHRP Delivery Estimates

Summary–Who Hid the Trucks?

Presumably, Howard Stein-Hudson can be held responsible for not noticing that the NCHRP numbers were per 1,000 square feet, for not multiplying by the square footage of each land use, and therefore for including an erroneous table in the PNF.  Some would consider this to be very shoddy work for a highly-touted traffic consultancy.

But the one delivery per day figure for the residential component doesn’t even pass the sniff test. Anybody looking at that number would stop the presses.  The fact that this number was included in the PNF indicates that BDG isn’t reading its own proposal.   They’re just throwing up a smoke screen of numbers and assuming that people reading the document will not track down questionable sources of data, or check on the accuracy or their numbers, or perform basic arithmetic operations to point out very significant errors.  This says worlds about their attitude toward the project and toward the members of the community in which they plan to build it.

Appendix: The Tables from NCHRP

Tables Used By BDG to Calculate Truck Deliveries