'Sprawl mall' not friendly to pedestrians
With regard to the ludicrous claim by Hartz Mountain that their development project will be "pedestrian-friendly," how exactly do they propose to get pedestrians into their shopping mall? There will be no residents, so there will be no pedestrians living on-site. The residents in the neighboring areas find their plans so distasteful that they want a hundred-foot buffer between them and the Hartz Mountain Sprawl Mall. Obviously, none of them will be walking there, even if they could. Their entrance, which they don't want, will be for cars only. Nor has there been the slightest mention of bus service or a hiking trail to the nearest train station in Metuchen.

With more than 4,400 parking spaces, it is quite clear that all of their visitors will come by car. Those would not be pedestrians, but motorists who got out of their car, just like any other shopping mall. Unless they are planning on teleporting them in, there will not be any pedestrians for their development to be friendly to. As such, the H.M. Sprawl Mall will increase traffic, pollution and the depletion of nonrenewable energy sources, so their claim to be environmentally friendly is also preposterous.

Even if we disregard these claims as overreaching, their primary appeal to be of benefit to the local economy and tax base is totally without merit. The big-box stores and other retail chains that will populate the Sprawl Mall will take the lion's share of the money spent by the regional consumers and return a pittance in low wage service jobs and property taxes, which will be bid down in competition with the other towns along Route 1.

By the way, I realize that HM prefers to call their development "Edison Towne Square," but the only Edison involvement is in prostituting our land for national retail companies; there can be no town without residents and certainly nothing as urban as a square. If the council goes ahead and approves this fool thing, it will forever be known here as the Hartz Mountain Sprawl Mall.

Note to the council: this property is a prime candidate for reverting to open space.
Carl Peter Klapper
Edison