Water Works 57 - 3/9/05

The Road to Utopia

Utopia is a place most of us will never see. Utopian dreams most often afflict the young, or the lucky few who hang on to their youthful ideals long after more reasonable people leave them behind. I dreamed of finding Utopia myself once. For me neither youth nor idealism drove what almost amounted to an obsession. I came close, but finally gave up trying. A traffic jam ruined the last chance I had and I haven’t been in the neighborhood since.

Directions to Utopia are easy to follow, surprisingly so for a place with a name that literally means “Nowhere.” We usually take it to mean a perfect place. If you want to visit one, you have several to choose from. There are predictably more Utopias than places named Nowhere in America, but the numbers of both should remind us that the visionaries who carved this nation out of a wilderness included a fair share of cranks with a weird sense of humor.

The Utopia that captured my imagination – in Queens, New York – may be the most utopian of all. You can reach it either by car or mass transit.

Unfortunately, on those mornings when I found myself hurtling past the off-ramp to perfection – the Utopia Parkway – I still had miles of desperate struggle for survival ahead on the Long Island Expressway. The early rush hour out to Long Island from New York City through Queens is astonishing. I was only a temporary visitor then and thought I would get used to it, but the reaction times and fearlessness my fellow drivers displayed finally persuaded me that human evolution there had to be running a few steps ahead of the pace we’re working at. A stop for breakfast and a merge back into the madness was out of the question. Turn signals seemed a quaint anachronism in the precincts of Utopia and without more practice I wasn’t about to risk trying it their way.

I planned to drop in on a trip home. I figured a utopia must look as good at night as in the daytime, and the odds of finding a decent meal in one were definitely in my favor. Since traffic crossing Queens into Manhattan jammed up and slowed my trip back to New Jersey in the evenings, I hoped to enjoy dinner in Utopia while the congestion thinned out. By the time the opportunity arrived, road repairs created tie-ups so awful I feared if I left the main highway I might not be allowed back.

Then someone showed me a less obvious route home that avoided both the construction and the trip through the heart of the city. It saved 45 minutes of driving time too, but took me far from the place of my dreams. I never returned.

I never looked back either. As any veteran road warrior knows, shaving even half that much from any day’s time on the highways is like skipping right past utopia and landing in heaven. There must be at least a few of you, after some especially harrowing journey, who may have dreamed of bartering your souls, a few pounds of flesh – whatever it might take – to be relieved of the misery of your daily trip to work and back. I suspect decisions to find new places to live begin that way more often than we admit.

Living in New Jersey’s northwestern hinterlands usually means more time spent on the roads, not less. You put yourself farther from most of the state’s best jobs. It’s the sort of trade-off you make wherever you discover your own version of the next best thing to utopia: what we usually just call a nice place to live.

If you pick Hunterdon County for yours, chances are your daily trip to work will take you east on Interstate 78. Rising out of fields and woodlands here, it winds its way up and around the Watchung Ridge, through canyons of glass and steel and money, swoops down into the Meadowlands, to Newark Airport and Port Elizabeth, and leaves you at the gates of the Holland Tunnel, on the doorstep of the world’s richest city. Be warned: you may never grow used to a price you pay for rural living within striking distance of so much bounty. Traveling on a three-lane freeway, you will come to a full stop more than once before you reach the county line, still nearly 50 miles from Manhattan at 7 o’clock in the morning, every morning.

The apparent absurdity of the situation can be as frustrating as the delay. Nothing in sight from the highway could produce the volume of traffic on the road. Fewer people live out of sight. That line of parked cars stretching as far as you can see must have its cause somewhere, you think. Then you think about other routes and face the terrible truth. For most of the county, and everything west of us back to the Delaware River, there is only one way out. Everyone uses it and more people use it every day. New arrivals – joyfully unpacking even as you sit there – will join you tomorrow.

Our neighbors from Pennsylvania will be there too in their usual numbers, every one of us a miner of wealth in the golden lands to the east, where gross profit is measured less often by the acre and more often by the square foot. Ours is just one of many streams of traffic bound for the bridges and tunnels that cross the Hudson to New York City, or bound for the great confluences of highways and commerce on the way, at Bridgewater, Parsippany, Paramus, Woodbridge – places of legend to commuters – or other places no less formidable. At each of them, every working day, all the science, art and ingenuity that 21st century traffic engineering can muster is routinely overwhelmed and put to rout by human ambition, desire and dreams.

When you find yourself snarled in traffic in any of them, the consolations of philosophy may seem a bit overrated if not downright rude. You are the cause of your own complaint, if you have one. A stoic detachment is your best defense, and your best hope for coping with the really bad news.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand may have finally met its match here in New Jersey. Our traffic problems should have begun sorting themselves out more than 15 years ago, when they were already impossible to ignore. More sensible options for living and working should have arrived by now. The magic of free markets has apparently been outpaced by our ability to fill our roads with cars, and we may have put ourselves beyond help from any quarter, including very sensible ideas like road pricing. If that diagnosis seems extreme, treat yourself to a ticket for the event of your choice at the Meadowlands stadium someday. Ours is a culture so adaptable, we’ve made traffic jams an integral part of what we call having fun.

As a result, an increasing number of people in Hunterdon want to discourage more extensive development of our part of the state. To develop or not, and where and why, are complex and controversial questions. Whether you favor one side of that debate or another, a look at how we created the problems on our roads is a useful exercise. What we learn may help us and the rest of the state avoid an even worse fate for New Jersey’s water.

Since the subject we will only begin to address today will take us through at least two more episodes, now is a good time for a pause in the action. Let’s set our story aside for a moment and attend to some routine maintenance on this series. I owe you a few explanations too.

When I last left you (56), I had every intention of ringing in the new year with a set of new chapters in the more eye-friendly format you are looking at now. The last thing I expected – and the last thing you probably expected – was another of the prolonged silences Water Works has imposed on itself in the past. (52) As you recall, back on Labor Day I was reveling in my new-found freedom to talk about whatever I pleased, when I pleased. (53) I should have known better. Events have overtaken us again.

I can’t blame my absence entirely on our state’s Department of Environmental Protection. Here is the news – Franklin Township is right now taking decisive action on several fronts to protect and defend its water. One of our objectives is to establish beyond dispute a recharge rate for the aquifer at the headwaters of Lockatong Creek. Unless this is your first encounter with Water Works, you know what that means. It’s good news for Franklin and bad news for the NJDEP. (50)

While Franklin Township was occupied with that, the NJDEP was busy too. Unbelievable as it may sound, the state is entertaining a new proposal for more high-capacity water pumping from the same Lockatong Creek aquifer. This is a completely separate action from the proposal we have been fighting and have held off for two years. This unforeseen turn of events will require the state to defend the new plan to pump more water, its plan from two years ago, and everything else it has done here (51), in a public hearing. (i)

The first of those pieces of news was no surprise, but I was surprised the township moved forward as quickly as it did. The other shocked even me. What they both meant for Water Works was, I had to scrap the episodes I had planned and make a radical change in the direction the series was headed. I thought I would return to your desktop last month, but waiting to see how matters developed took me into last week, far longer than I expected.

Our motto – We post no whine before its time.

Let’s return to our story where we left it before the news break. I was talking about how New Jersey created its traffic nightmares, while you were waiting to learn what that has to do with the state’s water supply.

The primary causes of traffic congestion here are simple and obvious. Critical portions of our road system cannot handle existing peak demand. The number of cars using those roads exceeds the capacity of the roads to provide an efficient flow of traffic. Improvements to the system invariably lag behind the amount of traffic already there, and whenever the improvements gain an edge on demand they attract more cars. Those patterns have been so firmly established for so long they are practically axiomatic.

Control over residential and commercial development in the state, which determines the amount of traffic on our roads and where it will appear, is almost entirely in the hands of New Jersey’s hundreds of local governments. Each of them acts independently. They are not required to cooperate with each other concerning decisions they make that affect traffic.

In a perfect world we would have arranged matters differently. We would have determined the best places for people to live and work, reserved areas for future growth and discouraged development in others, settled all questions of equity and property rights to everyone’s satisfaction, and designed a transportation system to meet our needs for the foreseeable future. We could have done all that while we were building the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, before the interstate highways linked us seamlessly to the great cities at our borders and the rest of the nation. Had we planned properly then we could have avoided chasing our tails the way we have for the past 50 years.

We missed the chance forever, but hindsight has its uses. After nearly 40 years of building on more land in the state than anyone had since the first European settlers arrived, New Jersey finally began to think about its future. In 1992 we rolled out our first comprehensive plan for further development. It was a virtual encyclopedia of every lesson decades of experience had to teach, except one. We made compliance with its goals a matter of individual community preference.

The state’s 21 counties and 566 municipal governments all take part in a review and revision of the State Plan every few years. Otherwise they’ve been free to ignore it. The path I sketched that New Jersey could have taken 50 years ago is only one of the goals of the current plan. The State Plan is a blueprint for the future welfare of more than 8 million people. Have you ever in your life heard of a scheme at once so ambitious and so positively – there’s no better word – utopian?

It’s the way we live. The foundation of the entire edifice is what we call “home rule,” which in New Jersey gives most of our municipal governments nearly absolute power over how the land within their borders will be used. Just as a town decides on its own how much traffic it will put on the roads, with only a few more limitations it decides how its water will be managed and protected, or whether its water will be protected at all.

We will talk more about home rule and its implications for our water, when I reappear.

Ron Gutkowski