Tuesday, May 30, 2006

NJ Drivers

Have you been to Union (the town proper, not the county) at rush hour lately? I have. I tried to drive through it to get to route 22 recently. I would have been better off walking. That town has more traffic than the roads can handle at peak hours. It's a tough situation.

It's the kind of situation that I can see coming to my town, the Somerset section of Franklin Township. Every morning I leave my house as close to 6:15 as possible, because I know that if I wait until after 7, the traffic will already have started. In the evenings, route 27 begins to resemble a parking lot. Don't bother setting up speed traps - no one can go faster than 20mph.

Knowing this about my town, you can imagine how unhappy I am to hear that a developer would like to put in a whole lot of retail services, to go with some new "Fair Share Plan" housing.

This is the part where I admit that I can't make heads or tails of that document, gave up, and assume that it's about the exact rules and regulations for providing affordable and low-income housing.

What I do know, though, is that I do not think that new retail business near Bennett's lane are a good idea. I'm not thrilled about housing, either, because extra traffic is extra traffic, but adding businesses there would cause lots of people to be driving those roads, not just the people who would be living there. I don't know about preserving the red hawk, and I don't know if the township will make millions of dollars in tax revenue that more than offsets the cost of schooling any new children that the housing may bring in. I do know that our current roads can't support our current traffic, and unless that's addressed first, I can't feel comfortable about this project.

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