I made it a point to avoid the area like the plague for opening week. To the extent I left town for the grand opening and weekend.
Thursday and Friday went well but Friday night, Saturday and Sunday were traffic snarls. Zero accidents and zero calls to police were reported. So that nothing to report on that end.
The local news has a great write up on it below.
After a relatively sedate grand opening with moderate crowds, the floodgate opened Saturday for shoppers at the new Outlet Mall of the Bluegrass’ first weekend of business.
Retailers were delighted, mall officials say, but local residents were disgruntled over some lengthy traffic issues.
The mall, a 364,000-square-foot retail center just sound of Interstate 64 in Simpsonville, caused some back ups both east and westbound on the interstate and north up Buck Creek Road to Simpsonville.
Some residents in the Simpsonville area have said that traffic tie-ups Saturday and Sunday inconvenienced them greatly.
Jamie Jarboe of Buck Creek Road said she did not see how traffic could have been any worse. Gwyn Trumbo said that she and her husband, Jack, who farm for a living, were extremely put out.
The Trumbos live on Veechdale Road, and Gwyn Trumbo said that on Saturday, she became ensnarled in traffic.
“It took me two hours to get home from Louisville; it was a dead standstill on I-64 going eastbound,” she said. “There’s going to be some delays, we realize that, but two hours is a bit much. I made the mistake of going to Simpsonville to pick up my mail, and I turned left and it was bumper to bumper all the way to U.S. 60 back and forth. On Sunday, Jack was selling sweet corn at the flea market and it took him forty-five minutes to make it home, and we only live about a mile away.”
Simpsonville City Administrator David Eaton said that the traffic was congested over the weekend.
“Thursday and Friday were fine, but on Saturday and Sunday in the afternoon, it backed up,” he said. “There were a lot of people coming in, and we knew that was going to happen. Because it’s new, and a lot of people are coming to see it and we knew there were going to be a lot of cars, and there were.”
He said that the traffic plan worked well.
“The state police and our police officers did a good job getting people in and out,” he said.
Trumbo said that she worries that the situation won’t improve.
“I don’t think it’s going to get better,” she said.
But Eaton said that he thinks after the novelty wears off, traffic should ease up.
“I think that at first it’s going to be like that, because it’s new and people want to see it,” he said. “So I thoroughly expect that we’re going to have another big weekend, and that’s normal. Once the newness wears off, it’ll settle into a pattern and we’ll go from there.”
Officials with the mall said the weekend traffic was about what they expected, and that sales were through the roof with an average of 30,000 people visiting per day.
Beating sales projections
Gina Slechta, vice president of marketing for Horizon Group, said the entire weekend went “amazingly well.”
“First of all, the shopping center opened up at one hundred percent leased, and it’s extremely rare for a shopping center to open at one hundred percent leased,” she said.
And while a handful of stores weren’t open for the first weekend, Slechta said that was because some stores weren’t leased until a just few months ago.
“That was to expected; but the majority of them were open, and the ones that we had planned to be open were open,” she said.
Slechta said that shoppers came in numbers that mall officials had anticipated.
“We had exactly what we had predicted,” she said. “On Thursday, there was an accident on I-64, that probably kept a few of the Lexington customers from getting to the shopping center. We exceeded that fifteen thousand mark daily for the weekend, and that’s not shoppers, that’s cars, averaging two-point-five people per car. We had very good feedback from the merchants. The majority of the retailers exceeded their projections for the weekend.”
She commended a traffic plan coordinated by the Simpsonville Police Department, Kentucky State Police and the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet that contained several components, including offsite parking, officers directing traffic at key areas, digital signs with traffic updates along I-64, and the presence of a Safe Patrol unit supplied by the cabinet.
“We were extremely impressed with the local authorities and the state police and how smoothly we were able to move traffic along,” she said.
She said she could not compare the event to the opening of a similar mall in Atlanta, because the two locations are to different in terms of demographics, including traffic congestion.
“They’re so totally different,” she said. “Atlanta is so large and every day Atlanta has traffic jams. So there’s no comparison.”
Slechta acknowledged that though Thursday and Friday brought no traffic problems, Saturday and Sunday were different.
“There were some peak times when we had traffic backed up,” she said.
“There were short waits, there was nothing over an hour, in fact, there was nothing over thirty minutes.”
Outlet mall: Weekend draws thousands of shoppers | SentinelNews.com.
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