Eric Mezzo wrote:Kaback9 wrote:Also Middlesex County seems to not be on board with trains going straight out to Mon Jct, what would make them allow for trains to go through this way? More grade crossings on the Amboy Sec.
For Middlesex county to blatantly oppose rail service to their county when the whole point of this project was to include them too is beyond sickening.
It's all about money and fear.
The money of the people who have expensive homes in South Brunswick/Monmouth Jct. along a handful of streets near the tracks, worried about their property values going down with "hundreds of trains running day and night."
It's about the fear and lies invented by local politicians ("hundreds of daily schoolbus crossings of active tracks") when the number of buses and trips that actually would cross the tracks daily when carrying children numbers only in the teens.
And the politicians even created a "civil war" by pitting northern Middlesex (North Brunswick, New Brunswick, Rutgers, J&J) against "poor elderly people in their retirement homes" in Monroe and people "who didn't know when they bought their expensive homes" in South Brunswick and Monmouth Jct. that those tracks in their backyards were "active."
The only people with a legitimate beef came from the folks in Jamesburg, where the route would run right through the middle of the town. And even that argument was full of holes.
Amazingly, people bought the argument that MOM would serve "only" Monmouth, Ocean and "Northern" Middlesex.
But somehow, our Freeholders were comfortable with okaying paving contracts for the widening of Rt. 1 for BRT lanes in that same area. Maybe that was before Middlesex got branded with having among the worst air quality of all counties in the state.
"Sewaren, Sewaren. Next stop is Barber, then Perth Amboy."