(The following article by Joyce J. Persico was posted on the Times of Trenton website on November 28.)
PRINCETON BOROUGH, N.J. — The love-hate relationship Princetonians have with the Dinky spilled over into a transit study forum, packing Borough Hall with commuters who wanted to be sure of one thing: Retention of the little train that doesn’t wait for their connections, whose middle doors don’t meet the platform when it rounds the tracks into Princeton and that doesn’t run frequently enough for their taste.
“One of the beauties of living in Princeton is that you can walk to the Dinky and wind up in Portland, Maine,” said a resident, tipping the scales in favor of the Princeton shuttle.
Another man in the audience of 60 warned the officials present to be careful what they did with the shuttle that other towns along the East Coast would be lucky to have. Others wanted assurances that no matter which transit plan was eventually decided upon, the Dinky would remain.
Those plans include scenarios as extreme as doing away with the Dinky to not touching it at all, according to Jack Kanarek, senior director of project development for New Jersey Transit. He also said that having the Dinky as part of a transit system already in place weighed in its favor.
Although Kanarek could not offer concrete answers to many of the questions asked, he assured the audience that some solutions to ease Route 1 corridor commuter congestion would have to be taken. What he could not estimate is how long the $600- $700 million project would take.
Prompted by councilman An drew Koontz and former mayor Marvin Reed, the Monday night forum was designed to answer questions from the public about the $916,000 Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Alternatives Analysis Study that was released in February. The study found that a BRT system could add an average of 17,000 to 19,000 weekday transit system trips while reducing weekday car trips by 11,000 or 12,000.
Koontz, who has commuted three hours daily from Princeton to New York and back since 1992, said he wanted the forum because he felt “a lot of Dinky commuters I know are fairly uninformed” about a “number of plans afloat that affected me.”
Kanarek promoted the idea of a bus system to run parallel to a rail system that would alleviate some of the traffic congestion between Lawrence Township and South Brunswick, a 34-mile route that would include 22 BRT stations, five Park & Rides in New Jersey and two in Pennsylvania.
But since Princeton University wants to move the Dinky station 500 feet south to make it more convenient to a garage serving a new arts hub at the location, residents were worried about the train’s future.
Questions came from all directions, with one Princetonian suggesting that residents shuck the idea of a train or a bus and mount their bicycles.
“You’d take your life in your hands if you tried to do that,” a man in the crowd responded, drawing laughter.
Paul Bell of Pennington Borough commutes daily to New York and wanted to know why Hopewell was not included in the BRT plan.
“If you look closely at the BRT map, Pennington and Hopewell are outside the service area,” Bell said. “A lot of development is not part of this.”
A woman asked how many miles to the gallon a bus would get. (No one had an answer.) Koontz asked why the Dinky had to go through the “hand brake ritual” at the end of each passage and was told that was NJ Transit policy. A Princeton University student called the train a “lifeline.”
Infrequent scheduling of the Dinky, bus emissions and precedence for a rail and bus system running side by side (Pittsburgh is an example) were brought up dur ing the 90-minute presentation and question and answer session.
Reed, who now serves on the Regional Planning Board, said a “transit system will work when it serves the people who need it.”
Elements such as the transit village being planned in West Windsor and the move of University Medical Center at Princeton to Plainsboro also figure into the plans for improvements. Those improvements can only be paid for, Kanarek said, if implemented in segments over a period of time.