PACKET EDITORIAL, Feb. 25
By: Packet Editorial
Start with a mountain of freshly fallen snow, follow it up a few days later with sheets of torrential rain, toss on a thick blanket of fog, then blow it away with powerful gusts of icy wind and what have you got?
A) A really weird weather pattern
B) A really expensive cleanup job
C) A real mess
D) Central New Jersey, February 16-23, 2003
E) All of the above
The answer, of course, is E. As in Enough, already!
It’s not like our area hasn’t been floored by plenty of one-two punches before snow and wind, rain and fog, snow and fog, wind and rain. But we can’t remember another one-two-three-four punch like the one that hit us this past week, knocking us for a loop from Monday’s school cancellations and business closures to Sunday’s flash floods and treacherous, ice-slicked roadways.
It’s hard to find a silver lining in the cloud that has hovered over the Princeton area for the past week, but we think we finally spotted one when the black ice started melting Monday morning. Between the snow and the sand and the rain and the salt and the ice that both nature and man deposited on our streets over this harrowing seven-day period, there has developed throughout the region a network of extremely effective traffic-calming devices.
Potholes.
Actually, on some Princeton streets, terming them potholes would be like calling the Grand Canyon a small geological depression. Craters would be more like it. Tire-puncturing, bone-jarring, axle-bending craters that seem to be in perfect alignment with the wheel base of the average motor vehicle which, unless it is traveling at about half the permissible speed at the moment of impact, has just lent a new twist to an old slogan: Body by fissure.
Considering how much time, effort and money have been spent in recent years, especially in Princeton Borough, to slow traffic along particular streets lined with expensive homes occupied by vocal constituents, the presence of these newly created traffic-calming devices could be seen by some as a gift from the heavens. Forget about speed humps, neckdowns, islands, raised crosswalks, traffic lights, cross-hatched bike paths, on-street parking, dummy police cars and all those other costly deterrents to heavy-footed motorists. Let them try A.J. Foyting their way through one of those gargantuan potholes just one time and they’ll be cured permanently of their Indy 500 mentality.
Unfortunately, it appears that most of the really bad potholes are on streets and highways where we don’t really want traffic to slow down. On Nassau Street in downtown Princeton, for example, there are a couple of spots where you can never go over 25 mph anyway because there’s always too much traffic. Now, the potholes make you slow down to the single digits. Similarly, on some of the main thoroughfares through West Windsor and Plainsboro, where the potholes look like the Martians just landed in them, traffic-calming is not as high a priority as it is in residential neighborhoods where, of course, all the streets have made it through the past week with nary a crack.
Perhaps this phenomenon will inspire highway engineers and municipal road departments to rethink their design criteria and maintenance schedules so that the really nasty potholes start showing up in the places where complaining residents have expressed a desire to see traffic slowed to a crawl. Then, in the future, we could count on Mother Nature, rather than the taxpayers, to oblige them.
That’s what we’d call killing two burdens with one storm.

