Robots
other environmental impacts. This has always been a primary criticism of most of the traditional industrial development here now, it is a sea of missed opportunities to reduce the enormous carbon footprint of freight. Wemay have a chance to change this, improving public health and safety, and our quality of life.
Now the potential drawbacks. They’re tall, with some proposed at the height of a 14-story building. A stark white, windowless building the size of our downtown skyscrapers could dominate a suburban neighborhood and detract from the visual character of a community, without appropriate architectural design. Most Lehigh Valley communities do not have the design regulations needed, and depending on the nature of each project, a new development, redevelopment or building retrofit, a local government may be prohibited by the State from enforcing them.
Also, they will increase truck traffic, and exponentially. For example, a typical 1 million square foot warehouse has an average daily traffic rate of 1,740 trips, according to the Institute for Transportation Engineers. A high cube warehouse of the same floor area has 8,180 vehicle trips per day — an estimated 370% increase per day.
High cube warehouses height will present challenges for emergency services personnel who will need special training and expensive equipment, as well. With the majority of the region’s fire and ambulance services run by under-funded volunteer-based agencies, the danger of urbanizing suburban and rural communities with towers of goods is great. Put one in the wrong place and those impacts could be catastrophic.
Jobs will be reduced, as well. As in-store retail declines nation
wide, and those jobs dissipate, the warehouse and logistics industry for the last roughly seven years has served as a critical employer helping our region maintain and even grow the economy. Most places in the US cannot say the same. But, as JD.com, China’s version of Amazon, proves with its fully automated warehouse in Shanghai, any good can be moved by robots, and that has significant
implications for the workforce, now and long into the future.
So, let’s choose the positive, while we still can. Keep in mind, we have created a 28-page — and growing — booklet on this, so I’m just skimming the surface here. First, municipal planners must define these things as something different than general industrial or simply a warehouse. Communities have to write new regula
tions specifically for them into their zoning, land development and building codes. New regulations should cover not only where they should — and should not — go, but how they can be designed to be compatible with the surrounding community. These can be built with columns, windows, landscaping, driver amenities, truck parking areas and a host of other features to
preserve a community’s character. Communities should investigate how they’ll impact the need for emergency services, and require traffic, environmental and viewshed impact studies, to determine how they’ll affect our road and bridge network, air and water quality, stormwater infrastructure, wildlife and viewsheds.
They should also include a cost-benefits analysis to prevent a community from reaching for carrots like job creation or tax base that may not justify the costs it will put on infrastructure, loss of value in surrounding real estate, or a loss of community character. And remember, saying they simply cannot come here is not an option. Pennsylvania law requires communities to create space for every possible land use. Communities’ hands are tied and will need to regulate high cube and automated industrial, as a result.
We are recommending that municipalities band together in multi-municipal plans, which allows them to share the responsibility of planning for uses like this, thus giving community leaders greater control over where these should go.
Rather than municipalities allowing these by right as part of the code, we’re recommending they allow them as special exceptions and conditional uses — usually reserved for land uses like landfills or quarries that tend to have significant impacts on the community — so they can exert greater control over the process.
Finally, establishing a process that enables and encourages community feedback on proposals helps build trust between local governments and residents, educates the community and ultimately results in better projects that are more suitable to community needs and desires.
That is what everyone wants here, including the developers. Like everything new, high cube and automated warehouses bring an element of uncertainty. If we do this right, we can strip away muchof that fear and uncertainty and strategize for how these can best fit into our communities.
But if we are going to accomplish that, the time to prepare is now.