With West Windsor expecting plans from Toll Brothers for a mixed-use development on the Maneely property south of Old Bear Brook Road, traffic changes are in the works for the adjacent neighborhood.
Land use manager Sam Surtees explained Old Bear Brook Road will be repaved and closed off at Alexander and will become a cul-de-sac, meaning there will be no access to the new development via Alexander and Old Bear Brook. A traffic circle will be constructed at the intersection of Bear Brook and Old Bear Brook roads and will include a not-yet-built access road to the new development.
The neighborhood will be connected to nearby Princeton Junction Train Station and its New South parking lot in an important way. “There will be a widening of the sidewalk on the Bear Brook side,” said Surtees, “and it will be continued, along with the bike path to connect to the Vaughn Drive area. A boardwalk will be constructed over the wetlands there, so that cyclists and pedestrians will be able to travel across them to the parking lot and beyond. Construction for this pathway has already begun and should be finished quickly, weather permitting.”
The Toll Brothers development will include 51 luxury townhouses, 40 apartments above 20,000 square feet of retail, and 188 corporate suites (in an “extended-stay hotel” to be run by Toll Brothers).
The development will also include 72 Project Freedom apartments, allocated to physically disabled low-income residents. Surtees explained that while Toll Brothers would be responsible for all other construction, Project Freedom will build its 72 apartments.
“Toll Brothers will likely be presenting its conceptual site plan this spring, for review by the Planning Board, architects and engineers, and the public,” Surtees said. “Project Freedom will come in on its own, sometime in the future, with its own site plan relating to the 72 apartments. As of yet, we have no indication of when that will happen.”
In other development news, Boston Properties just brought a site plan concept to the township for the construction of a 150,000-square-foot Class A office building to be built in Carnegie Center West.
Construction is underway on the site of the “green technologies” office building being built on Clarksville Road by Princeton Junction Commons LLC. The company is widening the sidewalk, adding a detention basin and a parking lot, and constructing a 30,000 office building “on spec.”
Finally, the township of West Windsor is also currently involved in its own construction project: a detention basin on Meadow Road at the intersection with Clarksville Road.
“We are building the new detention basin to benefit some of the buildings and homes constructed along Clarksville Road and help with storm water management,” said Surtees. “In addition, we are building a sanitary sewer line under the railroad tracks there. This will allow everything to use gravity to run downstream, and will enable us to decommission one of the township’s pumping stations, the one located at Avalon Watch. This will result in cost savings for the township, because the operating cost to run sewer lines is cheaper than running pump stations,” Surtees added.
