PACKET EDITORIAL, May 26
By:
A friend of ours picked up the paper the other day, took one look at the headline — “West Windsor panel backs new complex” — and let out an enormous sigh. “Just what we need,” he remarked with obvious sarcasm. “Another gargantuan development out on Route 1.”
Our friend is a longtime resident of Princeton. He has watched with growing frustration the unrelenting buildup along the Route 1 corridor — the sprawl development that has gobbled up open space, brought traffic to a virtual standstill and measurably changed the quality and the pace of life here over the past two decades.
What really frosts our friend is that we continue not only to allow this kind of growth but actively encourage it. The Site Plan Review Advisory Board in West Windsor expressed unanimous support for “The Palladium” — a 750,000-square-foot hotel and business complex to be located directly across Route 1 from the MarketFair shopping mall — with board members calling it “a spectacular project” that will be “a great asset to our community.”
One wonders what “community” the West Windsor board is thinking about. Is it the same community that is suing to keep the 1,165-unit Estates at Princeton Junction housing development from being built? The same community where voters have authorized the highest open-space tax in Mercer County in an effort to bring unbridled development under control?
Even if one accepts the dubious notion that it is an “asset” to West Windsor to squeeze a new hotel/office complex the size of 40 football fields next to a proposed 28.5-acre shopping center (including a 216,667-square-foot home improvement warehouse), down the road from another proposed 160-room hotel, across the highway from an existing shopping mall that already is having difficulty retaining tenants, consider for a moment what the impact will be on the rest of the region, the broader “community.”
Traffic on Route 1 is already a nightmare. So is traffic into and out of Princeton, and into and out of the Princeton Junction train station, trying to get onto or across Route 1. Plunk a bunch of new hotels and offices down into this already overcrowded corridor and the consequences will make today’s problems seem trivial.
You think the Millstone Bypass is controversial today? Imagine what the situation will be a few years from now, when the build-out along Route 1 generates so much more traffic that this two-lane highway, whether it runs alongside the Delaware & Raritan Canal or takes another alignment, will be functionally obsolete.
You think cars speeding along Hodge Road and Mercer Street and Prospect Avenue are a problem today? Imagine what the situation will be on these and other secondary roads a few years from now, when runaway Route 1 development will generate ever-greater volumes of commuter traffic, with more and more people traveling around and through Princeton to get to and from work.
You think parking in downtown Princeton is impossible today? Imagine what the situation will be when visitors from the new Route 1 hotels, and workers from the new Route 1 offices, and shoppers from the new Route 1 home-improvement warehouses join the masses of drivers already circling the crowded streets of downtown Princeton looking for a place to park.
Our friend wonders whatever happened to the State Development and Redevelopment Plan, the document that was supposed to steer development away from open, suburban spaces and into centers, like existing cities, where infrastructure already exists. He wonders why Gov. Whitman’s commitment to preserve 1 million acres of open space evidently doesn’t extend to the real estate most vulnerable to development, such as prime property along the Route 1 corridor. He wonders whether his fellow residents of Princeton realize that, while they are arguing so bitterly over how to resolve their growing traffic and parking problems, the underlying causes of these problems continue to go unaddressed.
We wish we knew what to tell him.