Hillsborough Route 206 Bypass Is What's Wrong With NJ: Letter

HILLSBOROUGH, NJ — Jeff Tittel, Director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, shared his displeasure with the latest phase of the Route 206 project in Hillsborough.

Officials broke ground Tuesday on a $41 million federally-funded project to widen Route 206 between Doctors Way and Valley Road in Hillsborough. Read More: Officials Break Ground On Hillsborough Route 206 Widening Project

"This project is everything that's wrong with New Jersey's transportation and land use planning. Hillsborough overdeveloped along Route 206, and now we're rewarding them by building a bypass road that they can sprawl out along even more. All this bypass will do is bring more traffic and development to an area that already has too much traffic and development. This will be used to pave over the last pieces of open space in the area," said Tittel. "Instead of celebrating a groundbreaking, the Governor should have stopped this project. This is a bad project in a bad place at a bad time. It is a symbol of waste that will only cause more traffic problems and more pollution."

Tittel also noted that this project will only invite more traffic and congestion into the area.

"We've been fighting this project for 20 years. They started this bypass because Route 206 was turning into a parking lot, but now the bypass will allow for more sprawl and more traffic. Governor Murphy says that he wants to fight climate change, but you can’t do that by building unnecessary highways. This project will only cause more development, more pollution, and more greenhouse gases," said Tittel. "Instead of wasting millions of dollars on this project, they would have been better off bringing back the Raritan Valley Light Rail Line from West Trenton up to Somerville."

Tittel continued to say that the bypass will only shift traffic delays to other areas of the roadway.

"This is just going to create another parking lot. There will be bottlenecks at both ends of the bypass where it connects to 206 by Montgomery and then when it comes into Somerville. When you widen roads, you increase traffic and just move the bottleneck from one place to another. It’s like creating wider parking lots with even more idling. Instead of helping people, this bypass is just opening up more open space and environmentally sensitive areas for development. It will also impact the D&R Canal with more stormwater runoff and pollution," said Tittel. "If New Jersey really cared about commuters and keeping people safe, they would focus spending on fixing mass transit, not highway widening."

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