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High Hopes For Revitalized Route
By Bill McLaughlin
The following is our third and final story in a series on efforts to revitalize Route 9.
You only get one chance to make a first impression, and for motorists entering Bayville along Route 9, the view hardly takes the breath away.
The first jolt comes from the claustrophobic closeness of tiny shops along the way. It reeks of Bayonne and countless other places many residents abandoned for the countryside.
That is something Berkeley officials would like to change.
"We want an entranceway that's beautiful, greatly landscaped and esthetically pleasing," said three-term Mayor Jason Varano, himself a Harrison native. "It's definitely a pride thing. We have to get rid of the perception of a deteriorated strip."
Fast forward to the year 2020, when a partnership of private, civic and governmental parties works together to get the new town center open and ready for inspection.
It's the talk of Ocean County. Single family homes and condos line the southern border. Parks and open spaces - a link to the new rail-trail recreation path - are in another corner. A movie theater and small boutiques bring in visitors for a very personal shopping experience.
Such, at least, is the vision for the portion of Route 9 best known for the dilapidated Beachwood Plaza, a run-down, nearly empty plaza that hasn't seen a good day in years.
The concept has been talked about for years, but part of the 400-acre tract needs remediation and cleanup of buried cars, toxic waste and other pollutants before work can start. It's potentially a $1 billion ratable but could become a showplace for future growth.
"What we need is a developer able to afford the cleanup and also willing to make an investment based on the density we plan," Varano said.
National retailers like Lowe's have shown interest in the project but retailers don't often commit until they see tangible proof the project will fly.
The tangible proof may come in the quest for a solution to increasing traffic volume. According to the latest state Department of Transportation (DOT) figures, from 2004, on an average day, 16,490 vehicles traveled the state highway in the southern part of town. Just a mile to the north, though, the volume increases sharply to 29,113 vehicles passing a traffic control counter.
Those numbers mean business can thrive - assuming congestion does not keep patrons away.
Since widening the roadway is virtually impossible, DOT is working with area officials to keep the traffic flowing.
Tony Mazzella, who recently stepped down as chairman of Berkeley's planning board, said motorists' perception of the road has to change.
"I'm a believer that Route 9 is a boulevard, even though it's a national roadway," Mazzella said. "You're not going to go 55 (miles per hour). If that's what you want, stay on the (Garden State) parkway."
Mazzella said he is generally opposed to socalled "Jersey barriers" as unsightly, but believes that's where engineering might begin. Some intersections at the north end of Berkeley would be better off as one-way streets, he said, to reduce the number of potential disruptions in the flow.
"Fundamentally, the traffic issue is the number of entrances and exits on Route 9, and in the future, we'll try to share access where we can," he added.
Mazzella said one of the keys to development along the Route 9 corridor is having an alternative north-south roadway to siphon some of the volume. Any discussion of a town center mandates there be an alternate route. The most often floated answer is Western Boulevard, which would reach the southern edge of the development in the area where parks and residences would be built.
The scope of the undertaking means there will be more pressure on the roads surrounding it. As Mazzella noted, expanding Route 9 would require 110 feet from the center line. That would mean knocking down businesses on one side of the road for most of the length of Berkeley - an unlikely event due to staggering costs.
"We can't undo something that happened 60 years ago or more. I don't see any major acquisition of that right of way. But the use of Western Boulevard to relieve through traffic would be immense," Mazzella said.
By looking at the road as one continuous chain, perhaps engineers can figure out a way to keep queues from forming bottlenecks.
One solution could be staggered traffic lights that would allow drivers on feeder roads to access the highway. As volume switches in the other direction, the lights could be programmed to reflect the change.
"(DOT engineers) and our engineers are looking - for the first time, I think - at this as a road system," Mazzella said. "Rather than look at each problem separately, they're reviewing how one affects the other."
As an example, he said, sometimes striping conflicts with the intended result. At various points, the DOT put in striping to discourage left turns into businesses on Route 9. Many motorists treat the areas as a safe haven and turn left anyway.
"It turns out that there's enough room for a left turn lane anyway," he said, "and people are looking to do that, so why not let them?"
At the end of the day, the bottom line is that officials realize Route 9 is not a series of issues to be resolved, but one, intimately intertwined issue that must be looked at as a whole.
"We finally got everyone involved to think of Route 9 in its totality," Varano said. "With help from the county engineers and DOT, which has been doing an environmental study, we think the road will adequately handle the load in the future."
To read previous installments of our threepart series on the past, present and future of Route 9, visit our Web site at www.micromediapubs. com and view our News Archives.
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