READER’S VOICE by Mark Peel: Global warming close to home

Government needs to consider environmental effects of plans

Mark Peel
   Anyone looking for encouraging signs that policymakers are ready to get serious about climate change can only be depressed by the Nov. 14 letter — co-signed by the mayors of Plainsboro, West Windsor, Princeton Borough and Princeton Township, among others — endorsing the Army Corps of Engineers’ Final Environmental Impact Statement for Route 92.
   Environmentally, Route 92 is a disaster. But developers, including Princeton University, want it built. This is why the environmental movement is doomed to fail — because even the good guys lack the courage or vision to put sound environmental policy ahead of profit.
   The notion that we can relieve traffic congestion by building more roads is now thoroughly discredited. It’s impossible to attend a transportation forum without hearing a chorus of planners intone, "We can’t build our way out of this problem."
   We need only look north to see what Route 92 will do to central New Jersey. In his biography of Robert Moses, "The Power Broker," historian Robert Caro traced the pattern of sprawl and congestion repeatedly induced by Moses’ gargantuan highway projects. At the ribbon-cutting for the Grand Central Parkway, politicians and the press praised the new highway, saying it would solve the problem of access to Long Island "for generations." But the Grand Central Parkway solved the problem only for about three weeks; then it was the site of what the Herald Tribune called the greatest traffic tie-up in the history of the metropolitan area. This was in 1936, and one can argue that this traffic jam has persisted without interruption for 70 years.
   Moses’ answer was that more highways were needed, and a succession of freeways eventually encircled New York and Long Island like choking vines, all jammed to capacity within months of opening. Like Route 92, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge was supposed to relieve congestion by allowing motorists to get to Long Island without using the Triborough, which had become impossibly clogged. In its first year, the Bronx-Whitestone carried 6.3 million vehicles. But experts calculated it had reduced traffic on the Triborough by only 122,000 vehicles. Somehow the bridge had generated 6 million additional trips: it had not improved traffic at all — it had made it worse.
   New Jersey needs transportation solutions, not more roads. Automobiles are choking the life out of our state. Traffic is impossible because there are too many cars making too many trips covering too many miles. When Route 92 was resuscitated in 1998, the top-selling car in America was the Toyota Camry; it averaged 22 miles per gallon and emitted 8.6 tons of greenhouse gas in an average year. Today, the best-selling Ford Explorer consumes 33 percent more fuel than the Camry and produces 28 percent more carbon dioxide — 11 tons per vehicle per year. A transportation strategy that caters to bigger, dirtier personal vehicles making longer commutes is not a strategy at all — it is a suicide pact.
   Is it sound planning to pave over wetlands and sacrifice historic villages so that commuters in gas-guzzling SUVs don’t have to be inconvenienced?
   Sane transportation policy would discourage people from driving long distances to work and would help localities recover the true cost of single-occupant automobiles in the form of commuter taxes and fees on fuel consumption, emissions, distance traveled and vehicle size and type.
   Real solutions, though, take imagination, courage, and wisdom. There isn’t much of that in evidence in the plans for Route 92 or in our leaders.
Mark Peel is president of Civic Research Institute in South Brunswick and a resident of Kingston.