In her letter “WW Transit Village A Model For State” printed December 2, Lucy Vandenberg of PlanSmart NJ continues a familiar pattern with the project to raze and redevelop the Washington Road complex. That pattern: the only people who seem to want this project are the developers, planners, and politicians who will manage, oversee, and profit from its construction. Absent is the support, or even awareness, of the residents whose town will be permanently and visibly blighted by it.
We should be wary of advice from Vandenberg, who is based in Trenton, has only planned in highly urbanized environments, has no clue about our community’s needs, and has been with PlanSmart NJ only since May, 2, 2011. Township residents are well served to learn about the project themselves.
Alarmingly, too few people in the Township seem to know what has been planned and partially approved. But you can learn in five minutes at the train station: go to the Dinky platform and look out beyond the parking lot. You’ll see 50-foot, decades old trees obscuring some modest office buildings. Now picture a scorched-earth redevelopment, with the tree-lined buildings gone and replaced by the cheap, dull row housing such as has gone up on Clarksville Road. Do you really want that?
Planners such as Vandenberg talk about “urbanizing” our town. What they do not understand is that we do not want urbanization. We live here to get away from it. If we wanted urban life, we would live in a city. What modest urbanization we do desire is along the lines of Route 571 becoming a low-speed Main Street with a natural flow of traffic.
Attempts to construct artificial villages such as we see in Robbinsville, Forrestal, and Plainsboro invariably fail in their misguided dream to “build it and they will come.” Just go to any of these places at lunchtime on a Saturday in good weather and observe the emptiness. No one goes to these places because they are not places you would want to spend time. They lack character and are not on your way to or from anywhere. They aim not to be part of your day’s journey, but to actually be your day’s journey. They’re too uninspiring to serve as that. This is our future should the Transit Village continue as proposed.
Perhaps the worst part of all is that this transformation from “pleasantly wooded office park” to “cheap, barren, fake village” will be prominently and permanently visible to our good neighbors in Princeton as they ride the Dinky to and from Princeton Junction. At that point we may as well change the sign to “Princeton Chumption.”
John Hinsdale
Quaker Road, Princeton Junction
