Warehouseville, N.J.: Watch out for trucks
Coda
Greg Bean

I don’t know for certain where the members of the South Brunswick Planning Board live, but I would be surprised beyond belief to find that any of them live near the once-pristine farmland and rural neighborhoods close to New Jersey Turnpike Exit 8A.

The bulk of South Brunswick’s voters don’t live near there either, and perhaps that is what made it so easy to push through a wave of warehouse development that has destroyed the character of the area and will make it even more of a nightmare in the coming years.

When I first moved to the area of East Brunswick close to South Brunswick’s border, my family loved the open spaces, the farms, the narrow and picturesque roads that served the residents — Cranbury Road, Davidson’s Mill Road, Fresh Ponds Road, Deans Rhode Hall Road and Docks Corner Road. It was a true joy to travel some of them each morning before turning onto Route 522 through Jamesburg and Englishtown, on the way to Freehold. Not only was the drive beautiful, but it meant escaping the aggravation of Route 18 and Route 9.

All that has changed dramatically in the last few years as warehouse after massive warehouse has gone up close to 8A. With each warehouse, the amount of truck traffic increased proportionally along those narrow roads. And with the increased truck traffic, the time of my morning commute increased as well. It now takes between 20 and 25 more minutes to drive the back roads between East Brunswick and Freehold than it did in 1997.

And I’m certainly not alone.

Even in 1997, there were a number of warehouses along this small nexus of roads — the Wakefern warehouse on Davidson’s Mill Road and the huge Matrix site on Dock’s Corner Road, for example — but few were prepared for, or even imagined, what was yet to come. New officials and zoning changes have allowed and encouraged an unprecedented boom in facilities. In the South Brunswick politicians’ minds, the warehouses provide increased tax revenue without hurting too many voters. The majority of South Brunswick voters live along the Route 1 corridor, not the relatively rural area around 8A. Therefore, they aren’t dealing with the increased truck traffic on a daily basis.

I don’t remember anyone from surrounding communities being consulted before South Brunswick’s zoning changes allowed the boom in warehouse construction. And as a consequence, South Bruns-wick has damaged the quality of life, not only of its own citizens who live in the eastern portion of the community, but also the lives of residents in East Brunswick, Monroe, Jamesburg and anyone else who travels the Route 130, Route 535 and Route 522 corridors.

Greater Media Newspapers has followed this warehouse boom for years, and recently put much of the information together in a surprising package of stories that appeared in the North/South Brunswick Sentinel on July 28.

This year alone, according to that report, Matrix Realty Association asked to build a 438,607-square-foot warehouse office building on Stults Road; Alder Development applied to expand its 231,804-square-foot warehouse on Ridge Road; Heller Park North applied for a time extension for its application to build four warehouses with a combined 2.7 million square feet on Ridge Road; Route 130 Associates LLC proposed two warehouses with a combined square footage of 432,995 feet on Deans Rhode Hall Road, and the CNJ Co. applied to construct a 1.4 million-square-foot warehouse on Davidson’s Mill Road, a 101,331-square-foot warehouse on Commerce Drive and a 225,220-square-foot warehouse on Commerce Court West.

In total, nearly 5.3 million square feet of warehouse/office space was proposed in South Brunswick, and more is expected to be proposed next year as well.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Last week in a packed meeting, the Township Planning Board voted 6-1 to approve construction of CNJ’s 1.4 million-square-foot megawarehouse on Davidson’s Mill Road and Middlesex Center Boulevard, despite the objections of many area residents who are fed up with trucks barreling down the narrow roadways and flooding caused by runoff from the new construction.

It’s probably too late to do anything about this nightmare, because so many new warehouses are already up or approved. And even if changes are made to South Brunswick’s master plan next year to limit new warehouse construction, and the town increases its commitment to buying some of the remaining undeveloped land for open space, it will be too little, too late.

The sad fact is that while we can hold some limited hope that road improvements, better signage, stricter weight limits and more police patrols will reduce some of the frustration, residents in this area will have to live with the negative effect of these massive warehouses for generations.

I hope South Brunswick enjoys its tax ratables, ratables that come at such a cost to so many.

A part of me also wishes there was some way to even the score for the damage that’s been done, besides voting the politicians responsible out of office.

In a perfect world, the members of the South Brunswick Planning Board, the Zoning Board and the entire council would be forced to buy homes in the eastern portion of the township and live in those homes.

They’d be forced to listen to a fleet of 18-wheelers rattling their kitchen windows every morning, forced to patch the cracks in their foundations caused by vibrations, forced to dodge trucks speeding 60 mph on Deans Rhode Hall Road, forced to follow dozens of those trucks down Route 522 on the way to work every morning, and follow them home at night. They’d be forced to wait for hours on Route 522 as yet another big rig becomes stuck under the small railroad bridge near Jamesburg and has to be painstakingly extricated before it can slowly back up for a quarter-mile or so where there’s room to turn around. They’d be forced to live with the consequences of their actions.

That won’t happen, of course, but it’s always nice to dream.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers.