Dear neighbors,

This special edition of the E-Terrace News summarizes what happened last
week and what will be happening this week regarding our neighborhood
traffic study.

First, a big thank you to the 56 College Terrace residents who helped
collect data on cut-through traffic in our neighborhood last Tuesday and
Wednesday!  All our cross streets from Amherst to Yale provided volunteers,
as did California, College and Stanford Avenues.  After attending a
training session, these folks all took from 1.5 - 7.5 hours out of their
busy lives in order to record the last 4 digits of license plates on all
cars crossing into or out of a "cordon line" around College Terrace.

What will we learn from this data, once it is analyzed by the city
transportation staff?  We will find out what percentage of the cars on each
street has neither a local origin nor a local destination. We will also
learn which cut-through routes are more used than others.

This week, the focus will be on more standard traffic measures, e.g. how
many cars are using our streets and how fast are they going?  These will be
collected this week by Baymetrics, a well-respected traffic data analysis
firm used by the city.  You will notice rubber hoses in various spots, as
well as people with counters during peak periods at several intersections.

Let me emphasize that the purpose of all this data collection is to give us
an accurate baseline, against which we can measure any future increases
that might be due to the growth that's taking place across Stanford Avenue
to the north and California Avenue to the south.  Please don't be tempted
to change your normal driving patterns -- it doesn't benefit us to try to
artificially manipulate the counts up or down, and such efforts are easy to
detect.

Finally, I'd like to thank five members of the Traffic Study Advisory Group
(John Ciccarelli, Grace Liu, Paul Lomio, Emily Marshall and Louise Roche)
for their "above and beyond" efforts that made last week's cut-through
portion of our neighborhood study run so smoothly.  We had guidance of city
transportation staff, but everything -- data collection forms, instructions
for each volunteer, recruitment and training -- came together thanks to
their efforts.  College Terrace is truly an amazing community!

If you'd like to share any comments or questions with the Traffic Study
Advisory Group, please send them to me at kfdurham@earthlink.net.

 -- Kathy Durham, President, College Terrace Residents' Association