Cranbury residents, along with residents from southern Middlesex County, will be able to provide input on draft recommendations to better manage and address truck traffic in the area.
Residents can provide feedback on the recommendations of the Southern Middlesex County Freight Movement study when an in person public meeting takes place at the Cranbury School on 23 N. Main St. from 6-8 p.m. on April 17.
The draft recommendations have been developed by the county and North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA) in an effort to mitigate concerns with truck traffic that include safety and noise.
The Southern Middlesex County Freight Movement Study is funded by NJTPA at a cost of $400,000.
Middlesex County’s primary area for the study involves Cranbury, South Brunswick, Monroe Township and Jamesburg.
There is a secondary area that the study team will look at. The team will also look at parts of the county and adjacent counties.
A previous meeting was held in December in Monroe Township at the Monroe Township Senior Center on the study to address and come up with strategies to help tackle the issue of truck traffic.
When Monroe residents and residents from impacted municipalities attended the in-person meeting, they broke up into several discussion groups with the study team from the county and WSP USA, an engineering and design firm that is the county’s technical consultant for the freight study.
The study team has identified that the highest volumes of truck traffic are on the New Jersey Turnpike, U.S. 130 and U.S. 1 for the primary study area of Cranbury, South Brunswick, Monroe Township and Jamesburg.
In the secondary study area, the highest volumes of truck traffic are the turnpike, interstate, and parkway and meaningful volumes along the cross streets.
The team also found that high truck volumes are consistently found around Interchange 8A.
The goals for this study include “identifying routing alternatives for trucks to remove impacts from communities in the primary study area; and identify potential improvements to existing road and rail facilities to address congestion and safety.
The study is also designed to foster collaboration with municipalities, private industry and regional entities and provide recommendations to improve job access for workers and fairly distribute the benefits and burdens of the study recommendations.
