Transportation experts criticize Dinky plans

Chip Crider GS ’79 and Program in Transportation director Alain Kornhauser, a professor of operations research and financial engineering, have each proposed an automated transit system in which a set of rail cars would be programmed to go to certain destinations.

Kornhauser said in an interview that he envisioned the Dinky as a “horizontal elevator,” shuttling passengers between Princeton Junction and Palmer Square.

“Conversion to an automated operation … would offer frequent on-demand service at all times,” Kornhauser wrote in a letter to Town Topics in May 2007. “Everyone in Princeton Borough could walk to the Dinky.”

An automated transit system would be crucial if the University goes ahead with its decision to relocate the Dinky station 460 feet south as part of the Campus Plan, Kornhauser wrote.

“The University’s plan to relocate the Dinky train station is simply continuing a long-standing trend in the wrong direction … Is there really such little concern about our climate problems, oil dependency, and addiction to the automobile?” he noted.

In an interview, Kornhauser expressed frustration that the University did not put more effort into improving transit options while developing the Campus Plan.

“My beef with the University is that they have put a lot of very good designers and planners to work designing the arts center, and in my view they have thought very little about what to do with the Dinky,” Kornhauser said. “It’s unfortunate. They’ve shortchanged the transportation end of this thing.”

Crider, who drew up preliminary plans for a personal transit system, promoted his ideas in a Sept. 17 meeting to discuss plans for the Arts and Transit Neighborhood.

“The Dinky is a half a mile from Nassau Street, and that’s half a mile too far,” Crider said at the meeting.

‘Speedy’ automated transit

Crider’s plan, which he calls the Speedy Princeton Urban Rapid Transit System (SPURTS), features a rail line that stretches underground from the location of the current Dinky Station to a terminus north of Chambers Street. Along the way, the system makes stops at the U-Store and a station just north of Nassau Street.

Crider also envisions the system extending south of Lake Carnegie to a new train station there, which would eliminate the need for a large station located in the middle of campus.

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SPURTS would use “small two to four person cars” and be able to operate “on demand, 24/7,” according to plans Crider provided to The Daily Princetonian.

A SPURTS passenger could board any empty car and choose from a list of destinations, Crider said.

If successful, the system could expand to include stops at many locations, including Butler Apartments, the Princeton Shopping Center, Princeton High School and the Graduate College, according to Crider’s plans.

In his letter to Town Topics, Kornhauser described a similar plan, in which the path of the Dinky would be extended “to an underground terminus at Palmer Square with a new station serving the Arts Complex, and even a new third station located at the Route One crossing.”

Crider said he had been working on the plans for SPURTS for several months before Kornhauser’s letter appeared in Town Topics. Crider said he sent his SPURTS plans to Kornhauser but never received a response.

“I took a copy over and gave it to his secretary, but I never received a response,” Crider said. “Alain Kornhauser is a world-renowned expert in personal rapid transportation — I was hoping we could work together.”

Kornhauser said he was not familiar with Crider’s plan, but that building an automated train, as he proposed, would be more feasible than installing smaller programmable cars, as in Crider’s plan.

Persuading the officials

Crider said he presented his plans at a number of meetings with University officials.

At the first meeting, which took place in December 2007, Crider said he addressed “the appropriate people, sideways and down, all of them,” but explained he was not authorized to name those in attendance.

“I made my pitch, and they were interested,” he said.

Crider met with University officials again in August and will soon make another presentation, which is “about to be scheduled,” he said.

In an e-mail, University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69 said that he “remain[s] intrigued by what [Crider] has proposed,” but “can’t yet assess the feasibility of the plan.”

“I believe there is nothing we are proposing in our campus plan that would preclude implementing a plan like SPURTS in the future,” Durkee said.

Crider said attendants at a Princeton Community Democratic Organization meeting last year nearly unanimously supported a downtown Dinky connection. He has not met with elected officials from either the Borough or the Township.

“When the politicians get out in public, it seems that they are all afraid to speak up and ask for anything better,” Crider said.

Crider said he made presentations at five meetings of Borough or Township committees and has attended “almost all of the [Regional] Planning Board meetings for [the University’s] traffic and transportation plan.”

Borough Councilman Roger Martindell said in an e-mail that he thinks “connecting the center of town with mass transit is a good idea,” adding “whether that is economically feasible remains to be seen.” Martindell said he is unfamiliar with Crider’s plan.

Councilman Andrew Koontz said he did not have enough information about Crider’s plan to “make an informed comment.”

Looking for money

Both Crider and Kornhauser have said that the price of the system should not be an impediment to its construction.

“Expensive? Not really,” Kornhauser wrote in Town Topics. “What is truly expensive is our dependency on oil, our addiction to the automobile, and the environmental mess that we’ve created.”

Crider estimated that the backbone of the system — a line extending from Palmer Square to north of Route 1 — would cost about $100 million to construct. Crider said that the University should fund most of the project but added that the bulk of the money could come from donations.

“If $100 million landed in from an alum, I think the University would match,” Crider said.

Alumni donors have environmentally progressive viewpoints, Crider said, and would want to fund an experiment that could be replicated in towns across the country.

“This is similar to the ‘campus as a laboratory’ concept in the Sustainability Plan,” Crider wrote in his plans.

Kornhauser said he hopes that the University will be able to obtain government money for the project. “One could put together a proposal such that federal funds are there for 80 percent of the project,” he said.

Both raised many working examples of existing automated transit systems.

Kornhauser wrote that similar systems exist at “every major airport around the world,” while Crider cited an article from The New York Times that described a working system at West Virginia University in Morgantown and an effort by volunteer groups to bring a similar system to Cornell University.