Cranbury Road is a well-traveled, two-lane road in both West Windsor and Plainsboro that runs east and west from Route 571 at its western end to the Plainsboro-Cranbury border at its eastern end, a total distance of three miles. Its West Windsor portion covers about half the width of the township at its latitude, or 1.8 miles.
From the West Windsor-Plainsboro border at the Millstone River to its eastern-most point in Plainsboro at George Davison Road, it thus covers another 1.2 miles. After entering Cranbury Township it goes another 2.5 miles before coming to its eastern end at Main Street in Cranbury. Thus its total length is 5.5 miles.
In both Plainsboro and Cranbury it is officially known as Cranbury Neck Road, but since I’m from West Windsor, I’ll refer to it as Cranbury Road. I’ve lived just about 120 yards from it for a long time. The West Windsor portion lies in Mercer County and the Plainsboro and Cranbury portions are in Middlesex County. In both counties it is officially designated County Route 615.
When we arrived here in late 1957, Cranbury Road was quite primitive by today’s standards. It was a narrow two lanes and barely paved. That is, it had a very early version of some kind of black-top, but there was no painted centerline down its middle. And it carried very little traffic, perhaps a few cars an hour on a busy day. Some days there were hardly any all day. Today there are many hundreds in each direction.
Where it crossed Big Bear Brook — about half-way between Route 571 and Grovers Mill — there was a very primitive bridge. It was located just alongside where the present bridge is and north of it. There was a large beam — steel I think — on each side of the road that defined the edges of the bridge and a roadway of wooden planks. I think the ends of the beams were supported by large rocks or maybe concrete. When a car went over the planks, you could hear the rattling noise where we lived, about a half-mile away. The side rails of the bridge were made of pieces of steel pipe with ordinary plumbing fittings to hold them together.
Every once in a while some joker would unscrew the fitting on one end of a side rail and swing the pipe across the roadway so a driver would have to stop and put the pipe back in place along the side of the bridge before proceeding. Eventually, the pipes got very rusty and couldn’t be screwed together again. Remember that at that time the township had no police force to watch out for tampering with public works and no engineering department to fix such things. If there was a pipe across the road that was blocking your way, that was your problem.
That old bridge was replaced sometime in the 1960s by the county, and the road was straightened and realigned slightly to the south where it is now. The present bridge was built in 1986, also by Mercer County. From the badly deteriorated condition of the decorative timber rails that top its concrete sides, it is clear that it needs at least some minor maintenance.
Speaking of the lack of a township police department, I am reminded that we did have one part-time officer who augmented the state police who were generally responsible for this area. Thanks to him, I received my first traffic ticket on Cranbury Road.
I was approaching its intersection with Hightstown Road and about to make the right turn to go over the railroad bridge to go to my office on the other side. As I coasted around the corner — there was no signal light then and no traffic on Hightstown Road — the officer appeared from the opposite side of the road and flagged me down.
By the time he reached my car he was already writing out a ticket. “You went through the stop sign without stopping,” he said. I couldn’t deny it — although the stop sign had been installed only a short time before — so I had to take the ticket and go to the township clerk’s house that evening and pay my fine. It was something like $10. Note that before we had municipal offices, township matters such as tax collecting and fines were handled by officials in their own homes
At the crossing of the Millstone River into Plainsboro, Cranbury Road made a very sharp turn to the right, or south, as you approached the river from the West Windsor side and then crossed another very primitive bridge, much like the one described above with pipe side rails. The portion of the old road that approached that bridge is still there, since it provides access to a private residence that overlooks the river. The road was realigned and a new bridge built in the ’60s, and the current bridge was installed in 1999 by the state.
Not far from the new bridge on the Plainsboro side is the beginning of Grovers Mill Road, which travels through Plainsboro all the way to another crossing of the Millstone, where it becomes Millstone Road as it enters West Windsor. From Cranbury Road to Grovers Mill via Grovers Mill Road in Plainsboro the distance is 2.1 miles. From the same spot on Cranbury Road, if you stay on Cranbury Road in West Windsor, the distance to Grovers Mill is only 1.1 miles. I’ve always wondered why Grovers Mill Road in Plainsboro has that name.
A little over a year ago, a number of people who live on Cranbury Road undertook a major effort to have the township install sidewalks so they would be able to walk safely along that road. There are 24 residences on the west-bound side between Grovers Mill and Route 571 and 17 on the east-bound side.
If you’re familiar with that road as I am, you realize that putting in a sidewalk is no easy job. There is very little extra space on both sides for most of its length where those residences are. At some places there is a steep embankment that comes right down to the edge of the paved portion. There are also many large trees, utility poles, and several houses very close to the road.
The official right-of-way is 33 feet, which includes the present paved portion as well as an allowance for a shoulder on both sides. Although the paved portion is much narrower than 33 feet — about 22 feet — the extra space cannot normally be used for a sidewalk.
Any extra width is supposed to be used, if necessary, for a vehicle shoulder. And in this case some of that right-of-way width lies on private property. So installing just a sidewalk — to say nothing of a separate bike path — is no easy engineering job, even if confined to one side. The township is currently investigating the possibilities and recently held a public presentation of possible alternative approaches.
The sidewalk problem on a busy road is not unusual in West Windsor, and it is interesting to compare the Cranbury Road situation with that on Clarksville Road just a short distance away. When Clarksville Road was last improved about 10 years ago, it was widened and a sidewalk was installed from Route 571 nearly all the way to Landing Lane — that is most of its length to its intersection with Cranbury Road at Grovers Mill. That sidewalk is virtually unused, largely because most of the houses on that side of the road do not front on Clarksville Road, and, apparently, the few residents who live on the other side have no need or desire to walk along that road.
Cranbury Road is heavily traveled, especially during the time when commuters from both West Windsor and Plainsboro — and other places — are going to the train station. In fact, it sometimes seems as though the Plainsboro drivers think that the main thoroughfare is from Millstone Road onto Cranbury Road where they intersect — even though there is a stop sign on Millstone Road.
It may not be too much longer before a traffic signal will be necessary at that intersection. I remember that one was discussed about 40 years ago. At that time, cars coming south on Millstone Road failed to stop at Cranbury Road and crashed into the house facing Cranbury Road at the intersection. That happened twice to the same house within less than a year. After the second time, the owner put in the large boulders you see there now. Eventually, a steel guide rail was installed. Since then, I don’t believe anyone has gone through the intersection without turning left or right. They may not obey the “stop” sign, but no impacts on the boulders.
On the morning of Monday, August 11, this summer, I conducted an informal traffic survey at the foot of Bolfmar Avenue in Grovers Mill where it intersects Cranbury Road. School had not started then, so it was a typical summer business day. In a 15-minute time span from 8:30 to 8:45 there were 192 vehicles traveling west toward Princeton Junction. They included one motorcycle, one bicycle, one school bus, four small trucks, and 185 cars.
That comes to one car every five seconds — just going west. And they all entered the area on Cranbury Road. After passing me, some of these probably turned north on Millstone Road instead of proceeding toward Princeton Junction, and some turned south at the mill to go up Clarksville Road, but the vast majority did not. They stayed on the narrowest and most congested part of Cranbury Road all the way to Route 571.
Traffic on that stretch of Cranbury Road also includes that which has come from Plainsboro via Millstone Road. If that’s the way it was during the summer, I wonder what numbers you would get now that vacations are over and the school buses are with us in packs.
Follow-up on the “Main Drag”: My column of August 8 on Route 571, or Hightstown Road, was wrong in my designation of the thoroughfare as a state road. It is actually a county road. Even though it passes through three different counties, it is still County Route 571, whether it be in Mercer, Monmouth, or Ocean County. In addition, it is also designated as County Route 526 from Nassau Street in Princeton to the railroad overpass in Princeton Junction. Route 526 then branches off on South Mill Road and eventually ends up in Allentown by way of Edinburg and Robbinsville.
