Residents of LaForest Lane, citing traffic and a serious summertime accident involving two e-bikes, urged the East Hampton Village Board last winter to consider turning their two-way road into a one-way street. The board commissioned a traffic study, and agreed in the spring to install speed bumps pending its outcome. They were installed in August.
At Friday's board meeting, Robert Bove, a traffic engineer with L.K. McLean Associates, presented the results of the study: Leave the road alone. The speed bumps had made a positive change, he said, with cars now moving more slowly. "We don't recommend the change to one-way," he hold the board.
"It's important that we did this, and that we had put speed bumps in," said Mayor Jerry Larsen. "Now we can see that they helped drop the speed on the road."
Once in March and again in August, the engineers looked at the volume and speed of traffic on the curving residential lane, where the limit is 25 miles per hour. They also studied interactions at the intersections and the number of accidents over time. In March, they found that LaForest Lane averaged 360 vehicles a day. During the summer months, unsurprisingly, that number rose to 760.
"The biggest traffic generator for the road is the two beaches to the south, Georgica and Main Beach," Mr. Bove told the board.
More surprising was his determination that speed was not as issue. In March, he said, the average speed was 26 m.p.h., with the "85th percentile speed" — the speed below which 85 percent of all drivers travel — at 31 m.p.h. In August, after the speed bumps were installed, despite the increase in volume, the average speed dropped 5 m.p.h. to 21, and the 85th percentile speed moved down to 25 m.p.h.
The study measured traffic along Jericho Road as well. There is no posted speed limit on that road, which is a foot narrower, at 19 feet wide, than LaForest. Jericho, however, has no speed bumps. Had the board chosen to make LaForest one-way headed south, Jericho would have become one-way moving north.
A little back-of-the-napkin math shows that in the summer, 114 cars were still driving over 25 m.p.h. on LaForest despite the presence of the speed bumps, and Mr. Bove did suggest lowering the limit to 20 m.p.h.
Between 2018 and 2023, there were no car crashes on either Jericho or LaForest, Mr. Bove told the board. "Pedestrian circulation is not a concern. Parking is not a consideration. If you did [make LaForest one-way], it would be quite the undertaking. You would need to sign it and stripe it. You would need a lot of public outreach. You would have faster speeds, because when lane widths are wider, you see increased speeds. You'd have a lack of compliance. You might have an increase in potential safety issues. Currently there are no crashes, so there's no safety issues presently."
No residents were on hand to hear the discussion, which was a late addition to the morning's agenda.