The circulation element of the Princeton Junction train station redevelopment plan may not alleviate all of the traffic congestion surrounding the station, but it is the best design possible for easing some of it, township professionals are saying.
However, the theory that it may not be able to better accommodate all of the regional traffic coming into the township during peak hours, and that some intersections might still be deemed “failing” after the circulation element is implemented, has Planning Board members concerned.
The Planning Board got its first chance to review the proposed draft of the redevelopment plan — referred to it by the Township Council — on January 13. Township planner John Madden and township traffic consultant Gary Davies gave an overview of the plan to the board and followed it by going into better details about the circulation element. The review of the plan was scheduled to continue on Thursday, January 22 (after the News’ deadline), with the first part of its land use review. The land use review will continue into its next meeting on Thursday, January 29. The following meetings will take place on Tuesday, February 10, and Wednesday, February 18.
“We will not be crafting a plan,” emphasized Planning Board Chairman Marvin Gardner at the January 13 meeting. “We will be reviewing what was referred to us.”
Further, Gardner said, the board will be making recommendations to council no later than Thursday, February 26, and does not expect to ask for an extended period of time for review. “Council can accept the recommendations, modify the recommendations, or it can reject the recommendations entirely,” he said.
The plan, put together by RMJM Hillier, contains a base number of 350 housing units and sets up 10 zoning districts compiled from ideas discussed over the past year, most notably during a slew of “marathon” workshop meetings council has held this fall.
The plan was an amended version of a proposal put forth by Heidi Kleinman, who, along with Charles Morgan, voted against it, saying that the small number of housing units would not be large enough to generate interest from developers, an opinion shared by Steve Goldin, CEO of InterCap Holdings, which owns 25 acres off Washington Road.
Kleinman had originally proposed 500 market units, with 160 affordable units, for a total of 660 — a plan she said was a compromise and reduction from Hillier’s proposal for 1,”000 units that caused public outcry and delayed the process for over a year.
However, the focus of the meeting on January 13 was solely on the traffic circulation, which officials have continuously referred to as the skin and bones of the project.
The Circulation Element. One of the biggest needs the circulation element of the plan addresses is the regional need brought into the township from outside. Therefore, officials had to come up with a plan that provides Vaughn Drive as a connector between Washington and Alexander roads and providing a means of reducing the through-traffic in the Princeton Junction and Berrien City areas.
“There is a regional need we feel is important to be served through a true and accurate Vaughn Drive on the project, and we want to make sure that is accommodated,” said Davies.
Then, there are two distinct focus areas — the area south of the Dinky line, and the area north of the Dinky line. Because the plan includes a neighborhood focal point on the north side, there needs to be two separate types of roadway arrangements. “One is a retail-type facility that still has good access, even regional access,” said Davies. “You need activity to maintain vibrancy in these retail areas. It’s not sufficient to say, ‘Well the retail will attract it.’”
At the same time, the site needs to be able to get the traffic in and out, coming from Route 1 and Alexander Road and from Washington Road. “In each case, we believe it’s important to have two intersections at Alexander and two at Washington road.”
Davies said the plan also needed to include two crossings of the Dinky, although the township officials don’t have commitment from NJ Transit that it will accept two crossings. The two roads traversing the site form an X-pattern with the two intersections each on Washington and Alexander roads. There is a crossover point of the two roads, which solves many of the interconnection problems at the southern end of the site, Davies said.
The two legs of the X-shaped road system would come to a major intersection, intersecting each other at the south side of the tracks (see diagram at right). “The important thing from my perspective is that we are attempting to keep these as low-speed streets with lots of parking, lots of curb parking,” Davies said. “The retail people consistently tell us they want two-way travel. It’s two parallel two-way streets with parking on relatively narrow streets to help constrain speeds.”
Old Bear Brook Road would be a cul-de-sac, and there would not be a connection from the site to Old Bear Brook Road to respect the existing neighborhood, Davies said.
The goal, said Davies,is to keep street widths as narrow as possible. “Narrower streets make a more desirable community, and more walkable and more compatible with the retail uses we’re envisioning here. Also, they tend to constrain traffic flow in the sense they limit speeds and cause a more safe operation.” The plan shows 40-foot wide streets, but that could be reduced down to 36 or 32 feet.
The bicycle and pedestrian plan includes connections off-site to other facilities, particularly along the Dinky, and the township’s bicycle and pedestrian plan. It also recommends the additional crossing at Route 571 and at the south end of the platform. It also suggests a new walkway or access-way through the Acme Woods.
The plan determines that the builders of the individual sites within the development districts would provide access to their properties. The Dinky and NJ Transit facilities will be the responsibility of New Jersey Transit. The plan also shows Washington Road and Vaughn Drive to be state-funded projects.
The other piece is the reconstruction of Route 571 from the end of the state jurisdiction at Wallace Road to Clarksville Road, including the reconstruction of the intersection with Sherbrooke and Alexander Road. That is shown as the responsibility of the state Department of Transportation and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, which received state and federal funding for the project.
“This proposed plan really cannot mitigate all the future congestion that’s going to happen in this area,” said Davies. “We believe that it does provide the needed access, needed capacity. The on-site system works. We believe that these intersections at Washington and Alexander Road work well, and we believe the access to the properties along Route 571, along the Main Street sections work well. The township, however, has made a policy decision to constrain the width of Route 571 to three lanes.”
Davies also said the access into and through the Main Street area of the project is reasonable. “The west side works; the east side works, and the streetscape is narrow.” He also said that he believes that the regional traffic is well-accommodated and that Vaughn Drive will serve the regional traffic in that area well.
Still, though, NJ Transit is working with the interagency task force, and township professionals still do not have details from them yet, Davies said. The portion of Main Street to Clarksville is already approved and being advanced by the county, he added.
The plan also shows parking garages in “appropriate spots,” although he said it was a general concept and still needed to be worked out with NJ Transit and the West Windsor Parking Authority.
NJ Transit also has not yet indicated whether it would support two Dinky crossings. The issue with the Dinky crossings is that federal requirements state that even if there is a box gate on each side of the crossings, the train must blow its horn as it passes through, and this could affect the residential homes, which are shown in the plan to be only hundreds of feet away from the crossings. The only way around having the horns go off while coming through the crossings is if the township takes liability if an accident were to occur.
The plan also depicts a total of 6,”000 parking spaces — 2,”500 above the number of spaces available today at the station.
Congestion Concerns. Questions from the board focused on whether or not the circulation plan would relieve traffic in and around the station.
Board member Marty Rosen asked whether the professionals thought there could be a configuration that would be better in terms of alleviating the congestion. Davies said that he believes the current circulation element provides four main intersections that can serve everything on site in terms of access. “Secondly, we say to any developers, ‘Your traffic on-site has to be safe, it has to work.’ And I believe that the layout up here (in District 1) works.”
Traffic congestion outside of the main redevelopment area, however, cannot be avoided. There are other intersections that face regional traffic that little can be done to remedy, says Davies. Intersections like Wallace/Cranbury roads, Route 571/Alexander Road, Route 571/Clarksville Road, and Alexander and Roszel, are on the next tier of intersections, and they “are going to experience congestion.”
“So there’s no design that could be configured differently to mitigate that?” asked Rosen.
Said Davies: “No, and I think this design provides the maximum flexibility for traffic to find available capacity in the system.” For example, he said, over time, people may find that Wallace/Cranbury intersection is too congested and may find that going another way, perhaps through the roundabout may be a better option.
“The problem is that in Central Jersey, there are very few crossings of the railroad,” Madden said. “You’ve got congestion points. The major congestion is regional traffic,” primarily those who are trying to get to Route 1 or Route 130. “So there’s nothing we can do here short of widening the road so much that we have these thundering four-lane roads through the town, which would be completely in contradiction to what the town wants with the adjacent land uses.”
Further, Madden explained, one of the benefits of having a redevelopment plan circulation system is that it will better distribute the traffic, better than it is being distributed today. It will be much nicer on the off-peak hours and on the weekends, and more capacity will be created where the township currently does not have it, he said. But he said the problem lies with the peak-hour traffic, since everyone is coming off the train at the same time.
Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh said he thinks that the current awareness of the energy crisis may change people’s views on driving in a car every day to work, and having this development will mean that fewer cars will be coming into the area. “We don’t know if this trend is going to continue,” he said of the current driving habits of commuters. He said that even though the price of gas has dropped lately, people are still altering their decisions to drive everywhere. “I think all of this will change and as a result, the congestion might not be the way we see it now,” he said, referring also to the Bus Rapid Transit system that NJ Transit is looking at bringing in.
Madden echoed the sentiment. “You don’t even have a sidewalk network now,” he said. “Some people might decide to walk instead of driving,” once there is one in place under the redevelopment plan, he said. Davies also said that officials were anticipating “some very substantial reductions” in the number of vehicles because of “transit-oriented development.”
Planning Board member Chuck Chang said that “I thought one of our planning objectives was to relieve congestion, so I thought somehow, we should mitigate future congestion.”
The portions of the site that the township can control, including Vaughn Drive and the two intersections each on Alexander and Washington Roads, can successfully make the grade in this case. And adding more housing units or office space would still be able to work for those intersections, Davies said.
The three tough intersections, however, are Wallace/Cranbury/571; Alexander/Route 571 and Clarksville/571. “Today, those intersections are failing,” he said. “The train arrives in the evening, the Alexander Road intersection backs up all the way at least to Wallace. Wallace backs up at least to the tracks. It takes multiple cycles to get through those intersections.” And the approved improvements to Route 571 and that area will not provide substantial improvements to those intersections, and they will continue to be failing, Davies said. “The Planning Board and Council several years ago weighed all this, and said we can’t just keep widening it. So those intersections are going to fail.”
He also said that if builders at Carnegie Center were to come in and ask for approval for the remaining complexes on the east side of campus, the intersection at Alexander/Roszel roads would fail. “You have to make some difficult choices, and the township said, ‘Enough. We’re going to deal with it the way it is.’”
Gardner asked whether the construction of additional units, office, or retail, would “exacerbate the traffic congestion that exists today.”
Davies said the amount of traffic would increase in the intersections around the project, but “I think we have to also look at the compensation issues that this is a smart growth development in the sense that it’s the train station, it’s a transit-oriented development, so you get all the smart growth benefits as well.”
Gardner also asked how realistic the possibility was of implementing the BRT in the future. He asked whether the funding that is necessary to implement the infrastructure and road improvements will be there when the time comes.
Gardner referred to the state’s withdrawal of the funding for its portion of the work on Vaughn Drive, saying that it wanted to have more of a commitment and more proof that the township was serious about doing redevelopment in the area. State officials said that once a redevelopment plan was in place, considerations could be made to put the money back into the budget.
Gardner said, however, that there is also a possibility that some time in the future, there will be a fusion of traffic or infrastructure improvements from the federal government going to the state. “Some of these funds may not necessarily be allocated to us,” said Gardner. “However, I know that the mayor has taken the lead in meeting with the mayors of surrounding communities to deal with the traffic circulation problems along Route 1. I think the mayor probably needs to build on that coalition that he’s already formed, and press for them if these funds do become available for federal government for these infrastructure improvements.”
Hsueh said that first the township must show that it has a plan and then can negotiate with the state. “People need to start thinking of this as a mini-Master Plan,” he said. He pointed out that when it comes to the municipal Master Plan, officials do not create the plan based on which entity will fund each portion of the plan. Instead, a general idea is depicted, and negotiations are made when it comes time for implementation.
Board members also asked how the circulation plan mitigated traffic in comparison with what would happen under current zoning. “The as-of-right development probably had 60 to 70 percent more traffic generation than this plan,” and originally, the redevelopment plan contained larger concepts. He said the plan has since shrunk in density, meaning the as-of-right numbers now would probably be equivalent to double the amount of traffic on site compared with the ciruclation plan in redevelopment.
Rosen asked whether an increase in intensity would cause the need for there to be any physical changes in road structure.
“I’m very happy with the layout of the roads because it works functionally, and we managed to collectively blend in the promenade and to get distribution among all these parking garages and office buildings into the primary systems,” Davies responded. “Some of the other plans were not as good. This plan has flexibility, where if the plan were to change dramatically with a lot more office space, a lot more parking spaces, a lot more residential,” then any alterations might just include adding a left-hand turn lane or signals.
In addition, Davies said, “one of the reasons a person or couple or family is going to buy into this development in the first place is because it is a train station, so one of the members of the couple is going to ride the train, certainly.”
Residents’ Remarks. While there were fewer than a dozen residents in the audience for the board’s first review meeting, they did weigh in on the discussion.
Alison Miller, who serves on the parking authority and is involved in the West Windsor Bicycle and Pedestrian Alliance noted the possible purchase of the Acme site by the Dreher Group, which already owns several properties across the street. Miller said that when Dreher comes before the board, for upgrades, the board should consider widening the width of the sidewalk in front of the stores and creating a much better sidewalk connection from the front of the stores up to the entrance to the existing shopping center across from Sherbrooke. She also suggested that the board require the lighting in the parking lot to be consistent with Main Street parking.
Miller also said she thinks the bicycle and pedestrian alliance will be disappointed to hear that the bike lanes in the redevelopment area are “share the road” lanes, “especially when you have a promenade with two-way traffic, including parking, and I don’t know what the speed limit is going to be.” She also expressed concern about some comments that bicycle lanes would be hard to accommodate along Vaughn Drive, which officials projected will have a shoulder for the BRT buses. “Certainly, there needs to be some kind of bike lane for convenience, even before the BRT comes in.”
Resident Al Lerner commended the traffic circulation plan and made the suggestion that since commuters come from all over the place and leave from the station to go to various places, including Philadelphia and New York, that a form of color coding be painted along the parking area to help guide people more easily to where they need to go.
Resident Holly Kelemen asked whether NJ Transit would be funding or providing the township access to transit police, since “we’re promoting people to come into the train station. Are they going to help us in terms of the money?”
Hsueh said NJ Transit, like other property owners in the area, would have to first come up with a financial impact analysis that will be used in negotiations as the plan is implemented.
Kelemen also said that if there was no cul-de-sac on Old Bear Brook Road, that “we would view that as encouraging a major regional flow of traffic of not necessary the people who live in West Windsor, to come through our neighborhood. That would be an endorsement of the township that that is the preferred route to go through to get to our station.”
Resident Bob Akens said he hopes the board looks at the plan critically, “more critically than when you get an application from some developer. This has the potential for sending West Windsor in an entirely different direction from what it has been, and to the extent that it goes that direction or indicates to people that we want to go in that direction, I think it deserves very careful and critical consideration.” He said that if the board does not think it will work, he urges it to send it back to council with that comment.
Akens also asked that the board keep in mind the commuter. “There has not been one word mentioned in improving the lot of the commuter in all of this circulation discussion tonight. It hasn’t at the council level either,” he said. “There’s nothing being planned to improve the station, nothing being improved for the platform. Please think of the commuter.”
He also urged the board to weigh how the transit village will affect other parts of the township. “There hasn’t been any tie in to how this benefits the rest of West Windsor except that were going to come down and go to the farmers’ market. That’s possibly worthwhile, but basically we’re looking at the benefit to the new people that are coming in to this area. This area is going to be so hopping, there is not going to be any potential market for my house to someone coming to West Windsor wanting to commute to New York.”
Added Akens: “I don’t think its that good, but I would just like to tell you to think of all of West Windsor.”
Before the meeting ended, Gardner said that the plan obviously had holes, since NJ Transit had yet to come through with definite plans for their parcels, and the board does not yet know where the parking authority stands on its issues. “Quite frankly, much of this plan, if it goes wherever it may go, ultimately may be modified dramatically,” he said. “I don’t think this plan in its totality is happening over night, and quite frankly, if it does get developed, it will be developed in a piecemeal way.”
Further, “I think we need to mitigate the traffic congestion as best as we can. I’m not going to be satisfied with the evaluation in terms of vehicular traffic and the exacerbation of the existing traffic congestion here. We need to look a little further in that regard.”
Still, he reminded the public that the board will do what it is required by state statute, which is to review the plan and make recommendations, “then let the council make its own decision.”
