Town of Amherst Traffic-Safety Board·August 5, 2026
Four requests, four refusals · A first-ever tie · The Starbucks driveway, revisited · Two empty seats
Amherst's Traffic-Safety Board turned away every resident request on its August docket — a one-sided parking ban on Lennox Avenue, an all-way stop at Gresham and Maynard, traffic calming on Exeter Road, and a three-way stop at Bridle Path and Dogwood — in each case because federal warrant thresholds were not close to being met. The night's substance came from an item nobody signed in for: the developer of the new Starbucks and Mighty Taco at Sheridan Drive and Mill Street returned with its own two-day traffic count, conceded that illegal left turns out of the driveway are a daily habit, and committed to three new signs before school reopens. Along the way the board deadlocked 3–3 on a modest pair of "cross traffic does not stop" plaques — a tie the chair believed was the board's first — and noted, twice, that two of its ten seats sit empty.
At its June meeting the board sent a message to the owner of the new Starbucks and Mighty Taco at Sheridan Drive and Mill Street: go back and look at your driveway. On August 5 the owner came back with a slide deck, two mornings of hand counts, and a partial concession.
David Chiazza[*], executive vice president of real estate at Iskalo Development[*], opened by correcting the record — the June minutes described a meeting with Starbucks representatives, but Iskalo represents the property owner and has not discussed the matter with the coffee chain. He was joined by Nick Doll[*], the firm's vice president of development, of 5166 Main Street.
Iskalo staffed the site on June 17 and 18, from 7:45 to 9 a.m. and again from 3 to 4 p.m. The morning tallies: 77 right-out movements, 44 right-in, 50 pedestrians on the sidewalk, another seven who cut diagonally across the parking lot, and nine improper left turns in and out of a driveway signed right-in, right-out only.
Then came the honest part. Every one of those improper lefts happened before 8:15 a.m. — before the crossing guards, before the pedestrians, before there was any traffic to hit. Chiazza said some looked deliberate, like drivers who do it every morning. They were "infuriating to me to see them," he told the board, before adding that he could not call them an imminent safety hazard at that hour.[1]
The genuine hazard he did identify was smaller and stranger. During the morning peak, cars stack up waiting to turn onto Mill Street and nudge forward a mile or two an hour to claim a gap — and in nudging forward they park themselves across the sidewalk. Because of the driveway's grade, a driver in that lane cannot see where the sidewalk begins. Chiazza tested it in his own car.
Iskalo's remedy, developed with traffic engineer Amy Dake[*] of SRF Associates[*], is three signs, all MUTCD-compliant rather than custom: a larger pedestrian-crossing sign mounted low enough to sit below a driver's hoodline, a STOP sign placed just short of the sidewalk in the right-out lane, and a DO NOT ENTER sign facing anyone tempted to exit through the entrance. The signs were on order; installation was promised for later in August, before school reopens.
Where the two sides split was landscaping. A member argued that two parking spaces and a stand of bushes near the exit block the view of the sidewalk. Chiazza had anticipated the question — Iskalo watched the video of the June meeting — and disagreed on the record, saying drivers approaching that lane are facing south and never look through those spaces anyway. A compromise emerged from the board: cone off the two spaces for a day or two during the next count and see whether visibility measurably improves, rather than removing them on a hunch.
The sharpest exchange of the night came from staff, not the board. Traffic Safety Coordinator Chris Schregel[*] pressed on why the driveway has a high point in its middle — why a driver must climb a ridge and then descend to the sidewalk instead of crossing a flat apron. He had asked member Dan Rider[*], a professional engineer, to collect grades; Rider drove his truck up the driveway and reported he could not see over the crest. "Why is that not flat?" Schregel asked. Drainage, Doll answered, deferring to the civil designer at Carmina Wood[*]: "I don't have that answer."[1] The board asked for one in writing.
No motion was made. The driveway is private property and its layout was approved by the Planning Board, so any physical change — extending the painted "pork chop" island, relocating the curb cut — would require a site-plan modification, and the curb cut itself answers to Erie County. The board accepted the signage plan as a first step and reserved the right to come back. Iskalo pledged fresh counts in mid-September.
This board cannot order anything built, moved or repainted on a private lot. Its leverage over the Sheridan and Mill driveway is a letter.
On June 10, after crossing guards reported drivers rolling through the school crosswalk and a member's own site visits found the sight lines poor, the board voted to write the property owner and press for a discussion — about a dedicated crossing guard and about site fixes — before school returned in the fall. The August 5 presentation is what that letter produced. The owner's representatives said they went to the site as soon as the June minutes reached them, and would have gone sooner had they known.
It is worth naming plainly, because it is the whole shape of this board's power: no vote was taken on the driveway in August either. What the board has is a correspondence, a September deadline it set itself, and a developer who keeps showing up.
Susan Marco[*] has lived at 42 Gresham Drive, on the corner at Maynard Drive, for twenty years. She asked for an all-way stop. She got a data packet, a debate, and a deadlock.
The numbers were not close. A stop-sign warrant under the federal manual wants roughly 300 vehicles per hour on the major approach across the eight busiest hours; Maynard produced 38. The minor approach threshold is 200; Gresham produced 30. Eighty-fifth-percentile speeds ran 31 to 33 mph on a 30 mph street. Marco noted, accurately, that the counters had been out during the week of the Fourth of July.
What made the item interesting was the crash history. Four reported crashes in ten years — one involving a cyclist struck by a driver who stopped at the Gresham sign and then pulled out anyway — and staff's assessment that three of the four would have been correctable by an all-way stop. Members described the intersection's geometry as genuinely confusing: a wide, angled corner that pushes the stop sign back and leaves drivers on Maynard feeling like they ought to be stopping.
A member moved a smaller fix: bolt "CROSS TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP" plaques to the existing Gresham signs. Staff supported it, noting the two roads carry similar volumes, which is exactly the condition that plaque is designed for. Others were unconvinced — the plaque faces the drivers who already stop, not the ones speeding through.
The vote came back three in favor, three opposed. With six members seated, a tie kills the motion. The chair said he believed it was the first tie the board had ever recorded, and observed a moment later that the outcome might have been different if the two vacant seats were filled. The item was then received and filed.
An advisory board carries a motion by majority. A 3–3 split is not a majority, so the motion simply fails — there is no tie-breaking vote and the chair does not get a second one.
That is a live risk in Amherst right now: the Traffic-Safety Board has ten seats and eight members, and six attended on August 5. An even number in the room means a tie is always available. The chair twice invited residents in the audience to apply for the open seats.
One resident of Lennox Avenue[*] in Eggertsville[*] asked the town to bar parking on the north side of the street from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. daily. The town surveyed the block: six households opposed, four in favor, one indifferent. Four residents came to say so in person, and not one of them supported it.
The street is 28 feet wide — the current town standard — with parking already banned for 50 feet on both sides at the Eggert Road[*] corner. One reported crash appears in the record, in 2019, involving an impaired driver and no parked cars.
Jeff Gearhart[*] of 30 Lennox made the most technical case, and made it against the town's own instincts. Federal Highway Administration and Institute of Transportation Engineers guidance, he argued, treats on-street parking as a legitimate traffic-calming device: parked cars narrow the effective lane and create "side friction," typically shaving two to three miles per hour, with the effect strongest on narrow two-way streets parked on both sides. "That's Lennox," he said.[1] Clearing one side, he warned, would produce a wider, faster corridor every evening.
The chair agreed with him. Looking at staff photos of the parked street, he called it a very nice-looking street and observed that when residents come asking for speed relief, the board's standard first recommendation is to park in the road. He added a procedural point: Amherst does not do part-time one-sided parking bans except around events, schools, or houses of worship — a restriction like this would be all hours or nothing — and that the Town Board, which alone can enact it, would be unlikely to act over this much neighbor opposition.
He moved to receive and file. Carried 6–0.
A fourth speaker, Kim Holland[*] of 100 Lennox, opposed the plan while acknowledging she is next door to the neighbor who requested it. "It's a little awkward," she said.[1]
It sounds backwards. Parked cars block sightlines, so removing them should be safer.
Traffic engineering says otherwise on residential streets. A car parked at the curb narrows the lane a driver actually feels comfortable using, and that narrowing — "side friction" — slows traffic more reliably than a sign does. Clear the curb and you have built a wider, straighter, faster road.
This is why Amherst's board answers speeding complaints by recommending on-street parking before it recommends anything else, and why it declined to remove parking from a street whose neighbors had not asked it to.
Anna Sweda[*] of 43 Exeter Road came because a car took out a tree next door in June, hard enough to separate a wheel assembly from the vehicle, and because twelve children live in the six houses at the Andover Lane[*] corner. She was told the crash was not speed-related. She said she found that difficult to believe.
The data did not support her. A counter placed mid-block at pole 59 during the week of June 15 returned eighty-fifth-percentile speeds of 33 mph northbound and 32 southbound on a 30 mph street, with about 300 vehicles a day each way, 24 southbound and 18 northbound vehicles over 35 mph, and nothing averaging over 40 in any hour. Two crashes in six years, both at Andover, neither speed-related. Exeter's S-curves, staff noted, do most of the enforcement work already.
The board offered what it had. Amherst does not install speed humps or tables — every pilot draws complaints about the noise from residents who asked for them. Police were already aware and had put an officer out, though Sweda noted the one time she saw him was 11 a.m. on a Wednesday. Members again suggested on-street parking, which residents had stopped doing since the crash. One oddity drew the chair's eye: the fastest vehicles clustered in the middle of the day rather than in the usual morning and evening peaks — a summer pattern, and one that coincides with children being outside.
Received and filed, 6–0.
Michael Tramposh[*] of 146 Dogwood Road made the most carefully constructed argument of the evening. He was not asking for speed control, he said — he was asking for a predictable conflict point where every driver must stop, look and yield. He pointed out that the Village Green[*] neighborhood is full of three-legged intersections with all-way stops, and asked, if the board disagreed, for a formal engineering evaluation covering sight distance, turning behavior and curb overruns.
Staff had already mapped the neighborhood, and the map cut the other way: every comparable three-legged intersection nearby is signed exactly as Bridle Path[*] and Dogwood is, with only the minor leg stopped. The examples Tramposh cited — on Troydel[*], on Sherbrooke Avenue[*] and Cardinal Drive — sit outside that pattern.
The counts were the furthest from warrant of any item that night: 52 vehicles on the major approach during the highest eight hours against a 300 threshold, 19 on the minor against 200. Eighty-fifth-percentile speeds of 28 and 26 mph, under the posted limit. Zero crashes in ten years. Sight distance to the curve he raised measures over 400 feet where 290 is the minimum for a 30 mph road.
The chair then made the argument that gives this board its character — that installing a stop sign here would make the intersection less safe. Received and filed, 6–0.
Amherst's Traffic-Safety Board is not free to put a stop sign wherever residents want one. It is bound by the federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and its New York State supplement, which set numeric thresholds — "warrants" — that a location must meet before a device is justified.
For an all-way stop, the manual looks for roughly 300 vehicles per hour on the major approach and 200 on the minor across the eight busiest hours of a day. Engineering judgment can override the numbers, but the numbers are the starting point — and on August 5 no location came within a factor of five of them.
Put a stop sign where traffic does not justify one, the board's reasoning goes, and local drivers — who are most of the traffic on a no-outlet residential street — learn within weeks that nobody is ever waiting there. They roll through.
Now the intersection is worse than before: pedestrians see a stop sign and assume cars will stop; the driver who did stop assumes the cross traffic will too. The sign has created false confidence on both sides. As the chair put it, the next complaint the board hears about a new stop sign is always about compliance.
A resident asked the town to lower the 40 mph limit on Hopkins Road between Schoelles Road[*] and Tonawanda Creek Road and to stripe out its passing zones. The counter, set in front of his house at pole 3200, found eighty-fifth-percentile speeds of 44 mph in both directions, roughly 630 and 670 vehicles a day, fourteen vehicles over 50 mph in the 4 p.m. hour, and zero crashes in five years. Hopkins is a county highway, so both the speed limit and the striping belong to Erie County. The chair said the speed data could as easily support raising the limit to 45 as lowering it, and steered the board toward what it could actually deliver: a letter asking the county to eliminate the passing zones at the next restriping, plus a referral to Amherst police for enforcement in the four o'clock hour. Carried. The requesting resident did not attend.
The most consequential thing said all night was not a petition. It was a staff briefing at the back of the agenda, delivered to a nearly empty room.
Erie County will repave Eggert Road[*] next year, from the city line past Main Street up to Six Corners in Eggertsville[*], and continue north in later years. The county has already agreed to add edge-of-pavement fog lines. More significantly, it has invited the Town of Amherst to direct changes to the striping as part of the same project — and repaving is the only moment when that costs nothing.
The underlying problem is old. Years ago a resident named Greg Dion[*] brought the board an item about the confusing lane configuration north of Main Street. That prompted a Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council study, which modeled the corridor and concluded it would benefit from a lane reassignment. The study has been sitting there. The paving schedule is what makes it live.
Members reached immediately for the precedent: the Kensington Avenue conversion from four lanes to two, which one member called a success he is grateful for every day. They recalled the public process too — a room with the drawings pinned along the walls.
The board's preference was to work in that order. See a design concept first, at a regular meeting. Reach a preferred alternative among members. Then take it to the public, escalating to a dedicated public session if the response warrants one. Staff asked for one discipline in the framing: "we're not calling this a road diet."[1] The term draws heat, and the outcome here may be a three-lane section rather than a straight reduction. Lane reassignment is the phrase.
It goes on the September agenda. Whether the public is invited before or after the board picks a preferred alternative is the decision worth watching — it is the difference between consultation and ratification.
Repainting an existing road to change how many lanes it has and what each one does — without moving a curb. A four-lane road might become two travel lanes plus a center turn lane, or gain parking or a bike lane.
The appeal is cost: the paint is going down anyway during a repaving, so the redesign is close to free. The catch is timing. Miss the paving window and the town waits years for the next one.
The term of art elsewhere is "road diet," which Amherst staff deliberately avoid — it implies taking something away, and it has cost similar projects their political oxygen in other towns.
The chair closed new business by asking the board to write the New York State Department of Transportation about the signal at Main Street and Youngs Road, where he sees an accumulating crash history clustered on weekend evenings. His theory is that the signal runs one timing plan around the clock, holding Youngs traffic for long stretches with nothing moving on Main, and that drivers respond by running the yellow. Staff was skeptical the state would break the Main Street coordination plan for one side street — it would ripple down the corridor — but agreed it costs nothing to ask, and that the request should carry a crash review with it.
Six of eight seated members attended and voted; two seats on the ten-seat board are vacant. Unless noted, motions carried 6–0 by voice vote. Councilmember liaison Michael Szukala[*] was absent — he was meeting with the mosque whose chronic Friday parking overflow on Fair Woods Drive[*] the board referred to him in June. No recusals were announced.
A member flagged a missing item in the opening paragraph; the correction was displayed on screen and accepted before the vote.
Adjacent-owner survey returned six opposed, four in favor, one no preference. Four residents spoke, all against. The board noted the town does not impose part-time one-sided bans outside event, school and worship contexts, and that installing signs would require Town Board action.
A tie defeats the motion. The chair stated he believed it was the board's first recorded tie, and linked the outcome to the board's two vacant seats. Opponents argued the plaque addresses drivers who already stop rather than the through traffic residents complain about.
Warrant analysis produced 38 vehicles per hour on the major approach against a 300 threshold and 30 on the minor against 200. Four crashes in ten years, three of which staff assessed as correctable by an all-way stop.
Eighty-fifth-percentile speeds of 33 mph northbound and 32 southbound against a 30 mph limit; about 300 vehicles per day each direction; two crashes in six years, neither speed-related. Police enforcement already referred. Town does not support speed humps or tables.
52 vehicles on the major approach and 19 on the minor during the highest eight hours, against thresholds of 300 and 200. Zero reported crashes in ten years. Sight distance to the nearby curve exceeds 400 feet against a 290-foot minimum. The board found the existing configuration consistent with every comparable intersection in the neighborhood.
The resident's request to lower the 40 mph limit was not advanced; eighty-fifth-percentile speeds of 44 mph and zero crashes in five years led the chair to caution that the data could support raising the limit rather than lowering it. The board instead asked the county to eliminate passing zones at the next restriping.
The property owner's representatives presented two days of counts and a three-sign remedy, to be installed before school reopens. The board accepted the plan as a first step, asked for a painted stop bar, asked that the driveway's mid-apron high point be explained, and proposed coning off two parking spaces during the next count to test the visibility claim. Physical changes to the island or curb cut would require a Planning Board site-plan modification and Erie County concurrence.
The chair moved to hold the item so members could read a seven-part resident submission that arrived the previous day. Staff agreed the item warranted time rather than an improvised answer.
Staff confirmed the traffic counts were collected but said there had not been time in the past month to prepare the analysis for the board.
Erie County will repave from the city line past Main Street to Six Corners and has agreed to add fog lines. The board's consensus was to review a design concept first, then take it to the public, following the Kensington Avenue precedent. Staff asked that the project be described as a lane reassignment rather than a road diet.
The chair cited an accumulating crash history concentrated on weekend evenings and a signal he believes runs the same timing plan twenty-four hours a day, holding Youngs traffic while Main Street sits empty. Staff noted the state is unlikely to break the Main Street coordination plan but agreed to forward the request along with a crash review.
Four residents left this meeting without what they came for, and the chair stopped twice to explain that the phrase they had just heard does not mean no.
A motion to receive and file puts the request, the staff data and every public comment permanently on the town's record without advancing the matter. Nothing is denied; nothing is built. If conditions change — a crash pattern develops, volumes rise, a neighbor's circumstances shift — a resident can ask again, and the board starts from the accumulated file rather than from scratch.
It also matters that this board cannot enact anything. It is advisory to the Town Board. A stop sign, a parking restriction or a lower speed limit requires a town law and a public hearing; what the Traffic-Safety Board produces is a recommendation, a referral to police, or a letter to the county.
Names in this brief are unverified. Two official sources disagree about who currently serves on the Traffic-Safety Board: the Town's website roster lists nine members including two who did not appear on the board's own June agenda, while that agenda lists a member the website omits. This meeting supplies new evidence but does not settle it — the chair stated the board has eight members and should have ten, and the member absent from the website roster introduced himself in the roll call as a seated member. Every name here should be confirmed against the official minutes before it is relied upon.
No agenda packet was available. Unlike every other brief in this section, this one could not be cross-checked against a published agenda PDF; none was captured for the August 5 meeting. Proper nouns therefore rest on machine transcription of the livestream alone, and all carry the [*] flag — applicant names, firm names and staff names especially. Agenda item numbers are taken from the chair's narration.
The recording ends before the meeting does. Capture runs 124.3 minutes and stops at 2:04:07, precisely as the chair closes old business and turns to site plans. Any site-plan review conducted after that point is not in this record.
Street names corrected against the town's official street inventory: Lennox Avenue (heard as "Lenox"), Eggert Road and Eggertsville (heard as "Agar"/"Egret"), Bridle Path (heard as "Bridal"), Schoelles Road (heard as "Shelless"), Longmeadow Road (heard as "Long Meadow"), Sherbrooke Avenue (heard as "Sheer Brook"), Hendricks Boulevard (heard as "Hendrix"), and Andover Lane.
One tally is unclear. After the 3–3 tie on the Gresham and Maynard plaques, the board moved to receive and file the item; the vote count on that second motion is not clearly audible on the recording and is reported here without a tally.
Prior-meeting context. The June 10 letter to the property owner, the mosque's Friday parking overflow on Fair Woods Drive[*], and the meeting venue are drawn from this publication's May 6 and June 10 briefs on this board rather than from the August 5 audio. Those briefs were themselves cross-checked against agendas that existed at the time.
A superscript [*] marks a proper noun corrected from a likely transcription error or drawn from audio alone. Verify against the Town Clerk's record before quoting in any formal communication.