Citizens of Hoboken:
Recently Mayor Russo released a traffic study proposing $9.17 million in road improvements to facilitate traffic flow through Hoboken. Taxpayers will pay for them, but who will benefit?
Are you aware that a “Stealth Highway” (SH) connecting the George Washington and Bayonne-Staten Island Bridges is being built to accommodate thousands of auto and bus commuters? Federal law requires an extensive Environmental Impact Study (EIS) to evaluate the projected impact of such a highway on the communities in its path. That impact would be monstrous: volumes of traffic, noise, and air pollution that would turn these communities into a wasteland. If the EIS were ever done, it would expose these dangers and prevent the road from being built. But the highway proponents (including NJDOT, NJTransit and the Port Authority) have found a way to avoid the EIS — they break their highway into segments, disguising each segment as a “local improvement.” (A map of the SH and documentation on its segments may be found at www.hartwheels.org.) The impact of these local improvements is never evaluated. Indeed, until all the segments are linked together, the full impact cannot be evaluated, because only then will the bottlenecks be removed and the full highway flow realized. And one SH segment goes through Hoboken.
Enter Mayor Russo. He applies the same segmentation strategy used to build the SH through Edgewater, Jersey City, and Bayonne. Hoboken covers only a square mile, and yet his traffic study only examines traffic north of 7th Street and west of Garden Street, as if traffic elsewhere is a separate problem. Even before a city-wide traffic study is completed, he is securing Hudson County funds so that recommended road construction in the north of Hoboken can commence immediately, including connector segments tying Garden and Clinton Streets directly into the north-south regional flow, and widening 14th and 15th streets to connect traffic to Madison and Monroe streets. These “improvements” would break the bottleneck at 14th and Park, so that Hoboken would be traversed not by a single highway, but by an expanded flow through Garden, Park, Willow, Clinton, Madison, and Monroe Streets. In short, the heart of Hoboken turned into a leg of the SH. Our residents condemned to a carbon monoxide hell. Is this what we want Hoboken to become?
That bottleneck at 14th and Park is our best friend, dissuading motorists from flooding into our city. Why does Russo want to flood Hoboken with traffic? Isn’t bringing the Stealth Highway into Hoboken under the guise of “infrastructure improvements” a betrayal of the public trust? Is that what we want from our elected representatives?
If I am elected mayor, I will work to impose a moratorium on all new road construction until an EIS is completed which evaluates the impact of the entire SH. Our platform requires that no major change to Hoboken be allowed until the citizens have full access to environmental impact information and the voters approve the change in a binding referendum. Zoning and Planning and Environmental Protection laws were instituted to protect us; these protections must not be undermined.
Please understand that I would not run for Mayor unless there was a good reason. Our community is in real danger, and the candidates Russo and Roberts have both betrayed our trust. For our own health and well being, its time to return government to the people.
Sincerely,
Daniel Tumpson