Legislation looks to revive New Brunswick light rail

NEW BRUNSWICK — Legislation is in the works to allocate $10 million toward the planning phase of a light rail for Middlesex County.

Anyone who has passed through New Brunswick in the past 50 years may have heard talk of a New Brunswick light rail. It’s a decades-old proposal to alleviate the traffic nightmares and gridlock on Route 18.

The newest proposals call for a light rail hugging Route 18, starting at Interstate 287 in South Plainfield and snaking through Piscataway, New Brunswick and East Brunswick.

“A light rail linking key parts of Middlesex County has the potential to bring enormous improvements to our environment, our regional economy and to the quality of life for the hundreds of thousands of commuters, workers, students and others who travese the central Middlesex County corridors that include Route 18, Interstate 287 and countless county roads and bridges,” Rutgers President Robert Barchi said.

Transportation studies dating to the 1970s suggested that Route 18 alone wouldn’t be enough to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of residents living along the corridor, and that some of kind of additional local transit system would be in order.

The last serious pause given to the New Brunswick light rail was the Greater New Brunswick Area Corridor Study, a $200,000 study published in 2001, that hashed out a route that would run between park-and-ride stations at Piscataway and East Brunswick.

Under the plan, the route would make its way along Route 18 and then Ryders Lane, making stops in Piscataway, New Brunswick, Milltown, East Brunswick and all five Rutgers-New Brunswick-area campuses.

Not much has changed on the road map, according to Jon Carnegie, director of the Voorhees Institute of Transportation at Rutgers.

“The street network has remained the same, the issues had remained the same,” Carnegie said. “Certainly there’s been more development in the downtown corridor.”

But a lot has changed in the political and fiscal climate, locally and nationwide.

“NJ Transit has been in a situation where they’ve been very fiscally constrained for a number of years,” Carnegie said. “They have priorities for other things, in terms of the state of repair, the tunnels, the expansion of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, that has been on the books well before anyone started talking about New Brunswick.”

Building a physical light rail might not be the most feasible approach, Carnegie said, but nonetheless, there needs to be some change to the existing transportation infrastructure.

“There are many ways to configure a system. In today’s fiscal climate, I think that a bus route and transit system might be the way to go,” Carnegie said. “In the future of automated transit, it’s much less expensive from a capital perspective.”

Plans for the $10 million study haven’t been finalized, as the money still is hypothetical. Carnegie pointed out that a smaller 2008 study done by the N.J. Department of Transportation pointed more toward utilizing a bus rapid transit system, rather than the light rail.

The money by itself wouldn't be enough to work on the project from beginning to end, Carnegie said, adding that it could cost hundreds of millions.

The Rutgers 2030 Physical Master Plan didn’t call for anything to do with a light rail, according to Peter McDonough, senior vice president of external affairs at Rutgers University, but he was in favor of the proposals.

But portions of the master plan call for a bus-only express route traveling from the Livingston Campus to Busch, College Avenue, Douglass and Cook.

“From a Rutgers standpoint, anything that increases mobility from the Route 18-Route 287 corridor, south to north direction there, just helps tremendously,” McDonough said.

At each campus, the bus would stop at a so-called transit hub, which would also serve as a center of campus life, according to the Rutgers plan.

Like with the 2001 study, the physical master plan calls for making George and Neilson streets each one way, while a portion of both streets would be dedicated to the bus-only lane.

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“I think that the College Avenue corridor still remains an important spine for the New Brunswick campus,” Carnegie said. “If the right-of-way that we suggested were adopted, I don’t know that there’s necessarily any incompatibility between the university’s vision.”

The $10 million is part of $166 million that the state Legislature is proposing to add to the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF), a pot of money used for funding infrastructure and transportation projects.

Last week, the General Assembly version, A3114, cleared the floor in a majority vote, while the Senate version, S1519, made it out of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.

State officials indetified roughly 50 projects across New Jersey in need of repair or upgrades, according to Tom Hester, a spokesperson for the Assembly Majority Office.

To that end, New Brunswick and Rutgers officials had been in touch with the Assembly and Senate Majority offices to make the case for additional funding toward these projects.

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Until the bill reaches the governor’s desk, NJ Transit said it wouldn’t comment on any such pending legislation because the funds are still hypothetical.

Another $6 million will look at redesign of the heavily traveled intersection of Easton Avenue, French and Albany streets.

Plans are in the works by the City of New Brunswick and Middlesex County to redesign the junction and turn it into a four-way intersection.

It would coincide with the construction of The Hub@New Brunswick, a 1.7 million-square-foot, mixed-use development project at the former site of the now-demolished Ferren Mall.

Spring Street by Easton Avenue and the New Brunswick Train Station would be realligned to create a four-way intersection.