Bernards School and Twp. Officials Agree on Ridge Traffic Solution

The school district will move ahead with looking at the practical aspects of following through on the Ridge Task Force's favored option for improving traffic flow and campus safety at Ridge High School during morning dropoffs.

The next step will be to seek the county's feedback on a plan to move a two-way driveway slightly north to an existing one-way drive off South Finley Avenue, said Schools Superintendent Nick Markarian on Monday night.

At last month's meeting, several of the school board members said they were leaning toward option nine, at a cost of just under $150,000. Even so, Markarian cautioned during his March presentation, "We are trying to solve a problem that doesn't really have an ideal solution.

On Tuesday night, the Bernards Township Committee also gave its approval to the preferred choice after months of meetings and two public sessions held by a specially appointed task force made up of township and Board of Education representatives.

Along with seeking the county's input, the township also will perform some preliminary engineering work on the plan to see if it will fit as proposed, said Deputy Mayor John Carpenter.

Markarian asked the Board of Education on Monday night for permission to conduct a survey of the frontage of South Finley Avenue to determine the proposed driveway's distance from other intersections.

"Then we can find out if the county will give us their blessing," Markarian said. The proposed driveway, which would lead bus traffic and those planning to park all day to the rear parking lots of the school campus, away from parents dropping off students, is the one proposed solution on which Markarian noted.

School Board Member Michael Byrne, who previously has said he would prefer to have traffic routed through the municipal complex, declined to give his approval for drawing up the survey to present to the county.

No final decision has been made, or engineering plans worked out, members of the school board said last month.The task force's 13 proposed options and consultant reports also can be found online.

During months of meetings, the task force developed a baker's dozen of different options, including a $1.1 million plan to construct a new entrance off Collyer Lane.

Meanwhile, neighbors of the project along South Finley have repeatedly questioned the process and choice of the task force, and again appeared at Tuesday's Township Committee meeting.

"Can we just thing about about the entire context with which we are making decisions?" asked resident Bill Connors. He again urged the Township Committee to follow through on what he said is a community preference to have at least part of the traffic routed one way in on mornings via an access road from the adjoining municipal complex on Collyer Lane.

Former Planning Board Member Ann Parsekian also noted that the Township Committee was cited the historic aspects of stone walls around much of the municipal complex when officials had previously declined to seek historic designation for the property. She added that a good stone mason would be able to widen the entrance while maintaining its historic integrity.

Another neighbor of the high school, Parag Dhagat, said that the proposal violates an ordinance regulating how much space is between entrances and exits. He added that the changes would create an unsafe situation for customers of the Bernards Township Health Department on South Finley Avenue.

Mayor Carolyn Gaziano and Carpenter said the task force, created last fall, had gone through every option and had exhaustively considered each. That included suggestions regarding use of the municipal property and an idea raised on Tuesday about possibly changing the configuration of parking lot B on the school campus, she said.

Officials say the option of installing a new driveway just north and parallel to the existing driveway by the Bernards Township Health Department building that would be an enter right-turn only, and exit right-turn only, and would have buses and students who are parking for the day heading directly to the parking lots C and D behind the high schools. Parents would drop off in front of the building, or behind the new gym in lot A.

School officials said the design would achieve the goal of completely separating bus from parent drop-off traffic. Markarian began his March presentation by saying that the goal of the task force was to improve safety on campus and get high school buses, now dropping off Ridge students at the Cedar Hill School, out of that neighborhood, rather than solving off-campus traffic problems.

That preference didn't sit well with neighbors along South Finley, who said in March that a series of new driveways heading into the complex haven't solved Ridge's decades-old morning traffic issues.

"I know there is no perfect solution," said South Finley resident Eileen Walsh, a direct neighbor of the high school who had some of her property used for an earlier parking expansion.

But she said that residents had been told that previous projects would solve Ridge's traffic snarls, including the alignment of the intersection at Lake Road and construction of back parking lots which she said were supposedly not to be used for student parking.

Option nine "just reshuffles the congestion on South Finley," she said. On Tuesday, she made some other suggestions that she asked the task force to examine.

Resident Brendan O'Connor at Monday's meeting said the goals of the task force had been "reframed" so as no longer to include alleviating the traffic and congestion in front of the high school each morning, where a traffic light sits at the intersection of Lake Road and South Finley Avenue.

Markarian said this month he didn't believe that the school can solve rush-hour traffic jams on South Finley Avenue.

Connors said last month that closing the existing driveway, which now allows vehicles exiting the loop in front of the high school to turn north in the morning, would add about 140 more cars to the main exit from the high school.

At Monday's meeting, Markarian said that last week the driveway was blocked off one day as an experiment, and it's closure did not cause problems with traffic exiting the high school after dropping off students.