DISPATCHES By Hank Kalet MOM proposal likely to cause problems in South Brunswick and surrounding communities.
Everyone in Monmouth and Ocean counties seems to want a new rail line, only no one down there is willing to bear the burden of having it run through their community.
That is the lesson that should be taken from the response to a draft environmental impact statement unveiled in Freehold a couple of weeks ago as part of a scoping process designed to determine which of three rail options will work best for central New Jersey.
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All the lines begin in Lakehurst and run through Lakewood, eventually connecting with the Northeast Corridor line. All are designed to get commuters from Monmouth and Ocean counties to New York, though none of the options actually takes commuters into New York (all passengers heading into the city would need to disembark in Newark and change trains). And none is perfect.
However, no one even remotely close to the issue wants to admit this.
To listen to the politicians from the Shore area, one would believe that a proposed line running northwest through Jamesburg, Monroe and South Brunswick would solve all the traffic issues in the region. What the pols from Monmouth and Ocean counties refuse to acknowledge, however, is that their preferred alternative would come with an absurdly high price tag about $860 million to construct and about $49 million annually to operate.
The alternatives one that would run north from Lakewood to Red Bank, where it would connect with the North Jersey Coast line and one that would run from Lakewood into Freehold and then cut east through Matawan to the North Jersey Coast line are not a whole lot better, though they are significantly less expensive, costing $730 million and $600 million, respectively.
The Monmouth Junction line, according to the alternative, would offer the shortest route and might generate the largest number of passengers, but ridership estimates depend on the construction of rail stations along the route, including one in South Brunswick. None of the stations appear to be included in the construction price tags, and if the debate in South Brunswick over a proposed station is any indication, there is no guarantee that any of these stations will get built.
Readers of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press know where I stand on the MOM line. As much as I believe expanding rail opportunities can offer a long-term benefit to the state, I do not believe the proposed Monmouth Junction line is worth the damage it will do to many of the communities it would run through in particular, Jamesburg and South Brunswick.
The MOM proposal would transform a little-used rail line into frequently used commuter line, running more than 40 trains a day though the center of Jamesburg, a disaster for a small borough in which about half the students walk across the tracks to get to school in the morning. In South Brunswick, the rail line would run literally 20 feet from dozens of houses in Dayton and Monmouth Junction and would require the construction of a tunnel at the Northeast Corridor line in the vicinity of the Monmouth Junction Post Office.
Similar displacements are likely to occur elsewhere and along the other routes being proposed, which raises a basic problem with far too many of the so-called solutions to our intractable traffic woes. The region has grown far too quickly, outpacing the expansion of infrastructure and creating political issues.
The fact is, you can’t allow housing to be built, allow people to move in and then say, "Oh, by the way, we’re taking your backyard and running rail tracks across it." It’s a classic NIMBY (not in my backyard) argument, but not one without merit.
Everyone involved, whether living here or living down in Tinton Falls or other towns along the various alternatives, is starting from this vantage point. The key to all of this, however, is that the folks down the Shore are the ones who view a new rail line as some sort of cure-all for all their traffic ills, but the rail option they favor most is the one that will cause them the least and us the most amount of pain.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].

