Orange County NC Website
Since the County cannot count on Crown Castle’s agreement to move its access road, any <br />requirement imposed upon the Treeist to construct a second access road runs the risk of ending <br />up with two roads traversing the Old Field Creek, the riparian buffer, and the wildlife corridor. <br />Moreover, since neither of these two roads may be well positioned to satisfy access needs of <br />the future soccer complex, a third access road may yet be needed. This outcome, with the land <br />divided by multiple redundant roads, might prompt an ironic parsing of the name “Millhouse <br />Road Park.” <br />The Safety of Children <br />Up until now, the brief traffic data note in our site plan has overrepresented by nearly a factor of <br />two the amount of traffic that we will create at this location. <br />6 At our present size, we would <br />generate approximately 64 trips per day total. <br />7 As we gradually grow this total will also grow. <br />Still, even at our most ambitious size, I project generating not more than 164 trips per day from <br />the new location. <br />8 <br />Mr. Stancil foresees a possible future in which “parents and children crossing back and forth <br />across [the access road] to access vehicles or other fields” and that our commercial use of the <br />access road gives him “serious concerns about the safety of future users of the facility, <br />especially small children.” <br />It is easy to feel that no cost is too high when attempting to reduce hazards to young children. <br />This, however, is a faulty approach to risk. It would prevent the soccer complex from being built <br />in the first place. <br />For a small child, getting hit by a 3,500 pound Prius is not better than getting hit by a 20,000 <br />pound chip truck. It is, moreover, far less likely for a chip truck to sneak up on you in the way <br />that Prius will. The riskiest time and place for a child will be when none of our trucks are in sight. <br />It will be during a busy Saturday in the crowded parking lot between the soccer games. The <br />most dangerous driver for small children will not be the professional driver of our larger trucks <br />who holds a commercial license subject to more stringent standards. The most dangerous driver <br />8 Long-term we may have as many as twelve 3-person crews. This is all that our site plan is designed to <br />accommodate. This means that, at maximum, we may have 36 employees who make two to-and-fro trips <br />to the company headquarters. Auxiliary support staff that also need to be at the company headquarters <br />on a daily basis may add about nine more individuals, but these will typically make only one to-and-fro <br />trip. While we will have additional employees, our consultants and some of our office staff will continue to <br />typically work from their homes, as they do now. <br />7 Presently we have about eighteen employees who, on a week-day, arrive and leave from our company <br />headquarters on a regular basis (other employees, such as consultants and some office staff typically <br />work from home). Of these, only fourteen of these employees create two, instead of one, to-and-fro trips <br />to our company headquarters per day. If we count arrival and departures as separate trips, we get a <br />grand total of 64 trips per day. <br />6 I am at fault for not looking at the traffic data site plan note more carefully. When I was originally <br />considering this question of traffic, I was most mindful of the 800 trips per day threshold that triggers a <br />need for a Traffic Impact Analysis (UDO section 6.17). Knowing that whatever we did we would be far <br />below this threshold, I did not take due care in counting how little traffic we actually would end up <br />generating. <br />5 <br />137