BY PATRICIA A. MILLER
Staff Writer
Part two of a two-part series
JEFF GRANIT staff Aerial view shows land in Monroe Township near Route 33 and Perrineville Road that could be the site for a 6,000-seat baseball stadium.
Traffic along the stretch of Route 33 from Manalapan through Monroe townships has almost doubled in the past 10 years, according to the state Department of Transportation.
"It’s congested," said DOT spokesman Marc V. Lavorgna. "There’s no doubt about that. There’s a substantial number of cars."
Roughly 25,000 cars chug through the 8.9-mile section of state highway in any given 24-hour period. In 1993, that number was 12,780 cars, little more than half the current count, Lavorgna said.
And with the burgeoning number of building projects slated for the near future, that number will undoubtedly increase.
There’s a tremendous amount of growth, coupled with available land in the central New Jersey area, which can be converted into residential and commercial development, said Martin E. Robins, director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University.
"It’s one of the later frontiers," Robins said.
The center recently completed a draft environmental impact study of Route 1 in the Penns Neck area of West Windsor Township, Robins said.
"There’s lessons to be learned from this," he said.
One of the lessons is, the more commercial development, the more traffic congestion, Robins said.
"Everything is jammed into two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening," he said. "The roadways were not designed for that purpose. You have to be very cognizant. You have to look at the infrastructure. It’s a state highway."
Too often, local planning boards approve applications and let the state worry about the impact on the infrastructure, Robins said.
"That needs to be addressed by the communities and the state as this development occurs, so the state isn’t just sitting there and taking one punch after another," he said.
Currently, 19 roads intersect with Route 33 between Manalapan and Monroe. So far, none of those intersections has made it to the DOT’s list of the 100 worst intersections in the state, said Lavorgna.
The DOT uses a rating system that assesses the severity and number of crashes at each intersection, using information provided by local police departments, he said.
"As we make the repairs, they come off the list," he said. "It’s a fluid thing. Some are just intersection fixes; sometimes it’s an actual capital project."
None of the 19 intersections along Route 33 between Manalapan and Monroe is currently rated or requires remediation, Lavorgna said.
"You take the average of those crashes and the total number of points at an intersection accumulated in a year, then you would have the rating for a year," he said. "As long as you are comparing apples to apples for each intersection, that will be a good indicator of which intersection is having the most severe problems. If you have 15 fender benders at a light, but three fatals in one spot and four other injuries, that’s going to get priority."
Local police departments are required by law to send all accident reports to the DOT no later than three months after the end of a calendar year.
"Our first indication of an intersection problem is usually a call from the police department or a municipality," he said. "We’ll ask for the data if we don’t already have it, and we’ll go out there and take a look."
So far, the Monmouth County engineering department hasn’t received much in the way of complaints for the Route 33 corridor between Manalapan and Monroe, Monmouth County Engineer Joseph M. Ettore said.
"But there is significant development going on in residential and retail across the board," he said. "There has been a substantial increase in traffic that relates back to that development. Route 33 has certainly seen its share of traffic increases on that road."
Several county roads intersect with that stretch of Route 33, Ettore said.
"We continuously evaluate how the intersections are operating and the level of service to the public," he said.
The biggest intersection along the 8.9 mile stretch of county highway is Route 527, with Sweetmans Lane on one side of the road and Millhurst Road on the other, Ettore said.
"There’s been significant residential improvements along that northern section of Route 527," he said. "At the current time, it hasn’t reached the point where we see an immediate need to do intersection improvements at routes 33 and 527. But as development continues to build, at some point the intersection will have to be improved."
The Route 527A intersection, which hooks up Smithburg Road and Iron Ore Road with Route 33 in Manalapan, has not been as greatly impacted by development as the Route 527 intersection, he said.
"The development along that western end has not to date been as significant as it has been in the Sweetmans Lane-Millhurst Road area," Ettore said. "We’ve seen more development in that section of Manalapan. All of Manalapan, as well as western Monmouth County, is experiencing quite a bit of residential development."
Lavorgna agrees.
What’s happening on Route 33 is an example of what’s happening in the central part of the state in the last 10 years, he said.
"It’s experiencing congestion due to the tremendous amount of growth in the region," he said. "The roads were not built for that capacity. Most were built for the capacity of 10 or 15 years ago."
The DOT encourages municipalities to contact the state Office of Smart Growth and to use smart-growth land-use principles, Lavornga said.
"If you are looking to develop, please consider the transportation end of it," he said. "Unplanned development is what will cause bottlenecks that are difficult to fix and traffic congestion problems."
Roads are assets whose value begins to diminish when too much traffic is poured into them, Robins said.
"Everybody is seeking their highest and best uses, and the roadway is treated as a free good," Robins said. "It’s a very dangerous course of action, and it’s the New Jersey experience."
Most highways are designed for some type of commercial use, said James W. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Policy at Rutgers University.
"That zoning pattern has been established," he said. "So much of the land has been developed already that you really can’t stop it. If there are large swaths of land, you can deal with it."
But if a town is consistent and has long-standing zoning, it’s not a foregone conclusion that the area will become a commercial strip, Hughes said.
"Realize there will always be tremendous pressure for retail development because there’s always a shortage of greenfield sites," he said. "The pressure is always there. Towns should really look to municipalities that have been successful in not having them turned into commercial strips and model their own planning and zoning on them."
And in many cases, the chase for ratables is "kind of futile," Hughes said.
A new McDonald’s in town could generate $40,000 a year in tax revenue, he said.
"But then the land behind it loses value," Hughes said. "It restricts the growth of residential values. Unless you get $500 million [or] $100 million ratables, the impact on the taxes is relatively small. It’s not going to reduce it very much.
"I’ve seen suburban municipalities become fully developed, with the rationale that they need ratables to carry the property tax burden," he said.
"But the overall tax rates are not much lower than those that have a different development path."