Reader: Edison in danger of obsolescence
Edison is in a crisis, and neither our mayor, nor the council, nor the Zoning Board, nor the grassroots organizations want to own up to it or change the thinking and the actions that have created it.

The crisis is that Edison is in danger of becoming obsolete. Why? Edison has been built as a series of single-use zoned projects. Such zones are by their very nature automobilebased. We are fast approaching the day when automobiles will be too costly to operate. As petroleum is depleted, futures prices will reflect the need to ration for the future, and petroleum and gasoline prices will escalate. Well before the costs become prohibitive, people will attempt to sell homes in automobile based developments and many, unable to do so, will simply desert housing for which they cannot afford the transportation that is needed to make their location livable. Since this is basically all of Edison, we can expect that it will become a ghost town unless corrective measures are taken immediately.

Unfortunately, the consensus among our leadership has been to reject the one mixeduse project presented to Edison in its entire existence. The main reason offered, aside from the self-serving lies and misinformation masquerading as research, clearly show that the leadership in Edison is incapable of thinking outside the box. While it is true that residences in single-use developments increase automobile traffic, residences in multiuse developments with access to public transportation actually decrease automobile traffic. The reason is that the new residents produce nearly no automobile traffic themselves and, if present in sufficient numbers, support the businesses that neighboring residents from the single-use zones can walk to rather than drive, with a net decrease in total traffic. Yet our leaders persist in believing the fallacy that any increase in residents increases traffic. They are incapable of conceiving of any style of development other than the kind that is certain to increase traffic and Edison's dependence on automobiles and gasoline.

This is why I have absolutely no faith in the mayor's "redevelopment agency." It will continue to produce, at greater expense, single-use-zoned mega-projects that are the cause of our current crisis. Worse, the mayor's obsession with limiting residences in developments is a prescription for the same low-density sprawl that plagues our township and which is extremely expensive to rectify, if it is even advisable. I predict that all of his redevelopment areas will have to be razed within the next 10 to 20 years.

What we need instead is to encourage high-quality transit villages such as InterCap's on the one hand and, on the other, to employ diversity zoning - where individual landowners apply for rezoning for uses not present in a neighborhood, but concentration of uses are rejected - combined with infill development in the residential neighborhoods close to public transportation, as well as at new public transportation centers with frequent service to the train stations, and "undevelopment" of the abandoned properties in the areas in between to create nature preserves and farmland. In both cases, the impetus for change comes from the landowners, not some all-powerful Big Brother agency. And in both cases, we will have produced an Edison that can survive without the automobile and gasoline.
Carl Peter Klapper
Edison