Plans for Brooklyn first Whole Foods supermarket are getting bigger — and the gridlock won’t just be in the grocery aisles.
The epicurean grocer is adding a massive, three-story, 430-car parking garage to its plans for a rooftop lot and a surface lot at its planned mega-store at the intersection of Third Avenue and Third Street on the Gowanus end of Park Slope.
Whole Foods’ glassy 68,000-square-foot complex could attract more than a thousand new vehicles an hour to Park Slope and Gowanus, a traffic expert said.
“If you have a vehicle turnover every 40 minutes, then you have … as many as 1,800 new cars an hour,” said traffic engineer Brian Ketcham.
A similarly sized shopping destination in the suburbs would typically be required to include spaces for 272 cars, he said. But with all its lots, Whole Foods will provide almost three times that amount in an area with fewer drivers.
“They are obviously planning to be a regional destination,” said Ketcham, “and preparing for lots of auto traffic in an area that should be catering to pedestrians and public transit.”
In a memo last week to local planning officials, a Whole Foods spokesman said the garage was added “to ensure that the store does not impact on parking on any surrounding streets.”
But neighbors say the damage has been done.
Third Avenue is also a truck route that will be dramatically affected by Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards plan.
“Traffic is already completely stopped up there with people using Third Avenue so they can avoid Fourth Avenue,” said Marlene Donnelly, a member of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus.
“Now we are adding hundreds more cars to that, plus all the delivery trucks and all the Atlantic Yards traffic.”
A spokeswoman for Whole Foods said the site’s environmental clean-up would be finished this year and the new store would open in spring, 2008.
