To the Editor:

In Pixar’s movie Cars, Lightning McQueen rescues the town of Radiator Springs from economic devastation caused by the nearby freeway bypassing the town. NJDOT is implementing a “trial” bypass of Princeton to severely limit access to Princeton from the rest of Mercer County via Route 1. This directly impacts Princeton merchants as well as Mercer’s Route 1 merchants who have customers that return home via Route 1 and Princeton. In the recent NJDOT town meeting on the Princeton Route 1 bypass trial, it was made clear that NJDOT is only interested in measuring an improvement in how many more cars could bypass Princeton, when the measurement test really should be whether the economic harm to Mercer’s Princeton and Route 1 businesses outweighs any improvement in traffic flow. If NJDOT is not interested in coming up with a way to measure the economic harm to Mercer’s local businesses, maybe businesses can use the courts to help with generating metrics to measure Mercer’s economic harm during the “trial” period. After all in the children’s story Cars, it took a judge who cared about local small businesses and a court order for Lightning McQueen to realize the economic harm caused by the bypass before he could rescue the town.

Donald Cox
South Harrison Street