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Not all municipalities hosting transit stations have chosen to develop in a transit-friendly pattern, but many opportunities remain in places where they might have been overlooked in the past. Some train stations serve as nothing more than park-and-rides, where the only activity near the train station is parking. Riders arrive and depart exclusively by car, parking and riding the train to work. The lack of retail or service establishments near the station assures that any errands to be accomplished en route (getting a cup of coffee, dropping off dry cleaning, picking up a quart of milk, taking the kids to daycare) to or from the train station must also be done in the car.
While not all rail-station towns have the potential to create dramatic changes in their region's traffic patterns, all rail stations could eliminate some driving by placing a few key businesses around their rail stations - coffee shops, mini-marts, dry cleaners, drug stores, etc. However, there are also some dramatic opportunities in New Jersey - places where the train station has the potential to make a significant contribution to reducing regional traffic, if the development near the station was configured to take advantage of the station's potential.
Some obvious examples of such places are highlighted below. These train station towns have good concentrations of employment, retail, and housing nearby that generate large traffic volumes. These jobs, shops, and houses are all very close to the train stations - most within a mile or two - but were oriented towards adjacent highways, making them only accessible by car. In the case of Hamilton, a new station was recently constructed from the ground up and the area around it constituted a clean slate upon which any number of compact development patterns could have been constructed. Instead, the preferred choice was a massive parking lot.
Edison and Middletown
It is perhaps unrealistic to expect to find transit-oriented development wherever a transit station is present. Some of New Jersey's train stations are located in first-generation post-war suburbs that developed in an automobile-oriented pattern, but did so before the decentralization of employment and before traffic became an omnipresent phenomenon throughout the suburbs - in other words, before the negative side effects of auto-oriented development had fully manifested themselves. The rail line may have preceded the town's growth spurt, but that growth spurt preceded the emergence of regional issues - traffic, land consumption - that highlighted the importance of transit.
In places like Edison and Middletown, while walking to the train station may be feasible only for a handful of residents, the rail option at least keeps some cars off the regional road system by allowing residents to drive their cars only as far as the train station (or be dropped off there) and use the train for the long-haul portion of their travel. Middletown and Edison and places like them are thus missed opportunities in a limited sense - a more compact settlement pattern around the train station would enable non-motorized access to the station for a larger number of residents, and adding retail and civic uses next to the station would reduce the need for additional errand-running stops in the car on the way home from the train. But such improvements would primarily reduce short-distance travel and parking needs among local residents who are already using the train to access work sites elsewhere; they would do little to impact traffic on regional roads. The neighborhoods surrounding these stations are primarily residential and thus contain few if any traffic generators aside from the stations themselves. (Raritan Center, in a different part of Edison Township, is a huge employment center and traffic generator but is a more recent creation and is not near the train station.)
The most dramatic missed opportunities, rather, are places like Princeton Junction [link] and Metropark [link], where the train station could have made a significant contribution to reducing regional traffic, if only the development in the vicinity of the station had been configured to take advantage of the station's potential. In these places, huge concentrations of employment that generate large volumes of traffic were placed within a stone's throw (literally, in Metropark's case) of the train station but were instead oriented towards adjacent highways, thereby encouraging access by car and squandering the station's ability to reduce in-bound job-related traffic. And, unlike in Edison and Middletown, the fact that the Princeton Junction and Metropark stations are surrounded by non-residential uses means that cars accessing the stations must share congested roads with traffic bound for the employment centers. The missed opportunities here are clearly of an order of magnitude far greater than those in Edison, Middletown, and their contemporaries.
Princeton Junction
New Jersey Transit's Princeton Junction train station is located in West Windsor Township near a huge employment agglomeration along several miles of Route 1 between Trenton and New Brunswick. But the office campuses of West Windsor, Plainsboro, and South Brunswick townships have sprouted there because of the presence of Route 1, not because of their proximity to the train station; their focus on automobile access is evidenced by the acres of parking lots that surround them.
None of these nearby work sites are realistically walkable from the Princeton Junction train station. Most are a mile or two away, but barriers - both physical and psychological - exist even for the closer ones. The station itself is flanked by vast parking lots that are inhospitable to pedestrians [see aerial photo - link], and the roads that connect the station with nearby employment centers are high-volume routes that lack continuous sidewalks. As with the office campuses, the train station's huge parking lots give physical testament to the automobile's dominance, even though the station is not the final destination of the cars occupying the lots. The station is geared toward access by automobile for workers whose place of employment is elsewhere; it is essentially only a destination in the evening, when people are returning to the area from workplaces in New York City and elsewhere in New Jersey.
With better planning it could have been otherwise. Consider that weekday boardings at the Princeton Junction station averaged 6,118 in fiscal year 2001, enough to rank it second (behind only Metropark [link]) among outlying NJ Transit stations. ("Outlying" excludes the three terminals of New York Penn Station, Newark Penn Station, and Hoboken.) There is thus a substantial volume of area residents accessing the regional rail system via Princeton Junction.
Imagine that a neighborhood of townhouses and single homes on small lots were located within easy walking distance of the train station and with good pedestrian access. (Some higher-density housing complexes already exist in West Windsor and Plainsboro, but they are accessible only by car.) With good street and sidewalk connectivity to the station, many of the riders at the Princeton Junction station would have the option of living in the adjacent neighborhood and accessing the station on foot or bicycle, reducing local traffic and cutting down on the number of parking spaces needed at the station.
Even more importantly, consider that the three townships of West Windsor, Plainsboro, and South Brunswick boasted combined employment of 56,778 in 1998, two-thirds as much as Jersey City and more than double that of Trenton. Much of this is arrayed along the Route 1 corridor; Carnegie Center (in West Windsor) alone boasts an estimated 14,000 jobs, and the Forrestal Center (in Plainsboro), with over 3 times the square footage of Carnegie Center, hosts substantially more. Compared to the just over 6,000 weekday boardings at the train station, it is clear that the Route 1 corridor's automobile-oriented employment centers are responsible for adding far more vehicles to the regional road system than the Princeton Junction station removes from it.
If just a fraction of the jobs scattered among the Route 1 office campuses were instead located in a dense concentration at the Princeton Junction train station, there could conceivably be as many people getting off the train in the morning as getting on. Each of these workers arriving at Princeton Junction by train would represent a vehicle that was no longer contributing to bringing Route 1 to a standstill each rush hour. What's more, the enhanced ability to access work sites by means other than private automobile would reduce the need for parking spaces at these office buildings, allowing more economically productive use of the land. Placing the parking in decks rather than on surface lots would free up still more land. Charging for parking would further reduce demand for parking spaces and increase the incentive to use transit.
Realistically, even if it were reconfigured as a compact, transit-friendly community, Princeton Junction could probably not be expected to replicate the same rate of transit ridership as Newark or Jersey City. Newark and Jersey City (and, of course, New York) serve as hubs on the rail network, their large employment concentrations sitting at the junctures of multiple rail routes, while Princeton Junction is served by only one rail line (the Northeast Corridor), thus somewhat restricting its potential catchment area. However, Princeton Junction could certainly equal, and likely grossly exceed (thanks to greater employment numbers), the success of such smaller transit nodes as New Brunswick, Morristown, or Summit that are also served by only one rail line but that have jobs located in compact, pedestrian-friendly clusters around their train stations.
West Windsor Twp. is actually currently considering the creation of a "town center" for Princeton Junction, along what is now a marginal retail strip. Sadly, however, even this effort is essentially turning its back on the train station, making no attempt to integrate the station into the envisioned downtown and thereby ensuring that access to the train station will remain almost exclusively by automobile.
Metropark
New Jersey Transit's Metropark station is located next to the Garden State Parkway in Iselin, along the border between Edison Twp. and Woodbridge Twp. Like Princeton Junction [link], the Metropark station sits surrounded by a huge concentration of jobs. In fact, Metropark represents perhaps an even more frustrating missed opportunity than Princeton Junction, because unlike Princeton Junction's elongated linear arrangement along Route 1, Metropark's employment is configured on a large, contiguous plot. The proximity of jobs to the train station, measured in miles at Princeton Junction, can instead be measured in hundreds of yards at Metropark.
But Metropark was not designed to embrace the Northeast Corridor train line. Instead, the logic of its location becomes clear with a look at the highway network. Like the nearby sprawling Raritan Center office/industrial complex, Metropark is strategically located at the convergence of four of New Jersey's major highways: the Garden State Parkway, the New Jersey Turnpike, Route 1, and Interstate 287. It sits just off the Garden State Parkway, within 2 or 3 miles of the Parkway's interchanges with those other major routes. This location makes Metropark accessible to a significant portion of northern and central New Jersey via the highway network.
Attracting cars from the highway system means providing extensive parking, to the detriment of non-vehicular access. While New Jersey Transit's parking for the train station is decked, the same cannot be said for most of the surrounding office buildings. Vast seas of surface parking separate the buildings from the train station and from each other, presenting a forbidding landscape for pedestrians to traverse. All visual cues proclaim that the automobile reigns here, that this is no place for foot or bicycle travel. The pattern of buildings and parking lots does not encourage pedestrian access from the train station.
Poor pedestrian access and a dearth of residential uses in the vicinity of the Metropark station mean that riders boarding trains there are accessing the station almost exclusively by automobile. And there are many such riders - an average of 6,209 weekday boardings in fiscal year 2001 gave Metropark the largest patronage among all outlying stations ("outlying" excludes the three terminals of New York Penn Station, Newark Penn Station, and Hoboken) and was enough to propel it past the previous year's first-place station, Princeton Junction. Given that the station is positioned adjacent to the Garden State Parkway and not well-connected to the local street network, most of Metropark's riders are using the regional highway network to access the station, thereby exacerbating the traffic already generated by the office buildings.
With only a few design changes - connecting the office buildings to the train station with pedestrian pathways, replacing surface parking lots with decked parking, improving pedestrian and vehicular connections with the local street system and nearby residential neighborhoods, placing higher-density housing near the station - Metropark could have been a model mixed-use transit node that kept hundreds, if not thousands, of cars off the roads during peak periods. Instead, it is a major contributor to regional traffic and a squandering of taxpayer investment in its train station.
Hamilton
New Jersey Transit's Hamilton station, between Trenton and Princeton Junction on the Northeast Corridor in Hamilton Township (Mercer County), is a relatively new station that opened in early 1999. It was constructed from the ground up, hence the area around it constituted a clean slate upon which any number of development patterns could have been erected. The station could have been used as the catalyst for stimulating new residential and employment growth in the area around it (see aerial photo [link]), growth that will otherwise consume more land elsewhere in the township and likely in neighboring West Windsor or Washington townships as well.
Instead, the preferred choice was surface parking lots. Like Princeton Junction [link] and Metropark [link], the Hamilton station simply functions as a park-and-ride facility, isolated from its surroundings and aesthetically discouraging access by anyone not in a car. [photo?] But it's not too late - as the Morristown example shows [link], it is possible to create new transit-oriented development by building on underutilized properties like parking lots. And the Hamilton station certainly has plenty of acres of parking to work with.