Light Rail Proponents Present Case for Englewood Stops

New Jersey Transit announced last week that due to impassioned opposition from both public officials and residents of Tenafly, it would be scrapping plans to extend its Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line into that community and would instead consider terminating its proposed light rail extension at Englewood Hospital.

The possibility that NJ Transit would weigh an alternative option pitched last year by Englewood officials encouraged Mayor Frank Huttle, who called it a "major development," for the city.

How is it though, that an amenity welcomed in Englewood could be so bemoaned by a town that sits immediately to its north?

For Englewood Economic Development Corporation chairman Adam Brown, the answer is simple.

"Englewood and Tenafly are not the same town," he said Thursday. "We’re not a town looking to stay the same, we’re a town that strives."

The town's working-class base, its hospital that employs many Hudson County and New York residents and its large downtown make it a much better fit than Tenafly for a public transportation option, he explained.

"We told [NJ Transit], 'Look, we're a very different town than Tenafly,'" said Brown, before running off a list of reasons why light rail would benefit the city.

"We’re a largely blue collar town that needs to be able to get to work. We have an enormous hospital that needs access to work employees. We have a large industrial sector that needs access to its employees. We have a large performing arts center which would certainly benefit from having light rail access to the towns to the south. We have a downtown that must be 10 times larger than Tenafly.”

Councilman Marc Forman added that the city's high-density housing along Route 4 and at Town Centre, where stops are proposed, also makes it uniquely suited for light rail.

"These people don’t have to take a car to the light rail, they just go down the elevator and they get on the stop," he said. "You read about light rail and transit opening up in various parts of the country and it fails because the housing is not right to support it. Whether you like it or not, we have the housing.”

Beyond conveniencing Englewood residents and workers, Brown said he believes a light rail extension through Bergen County should also foster an integrated internal economy in northern New Jersey.

"It’s going to knit northern New Jersey together because now Jersey City and Englewood and Bayonne are going to have a direct link, which is, I think, very good because it means we’ll keep more of our business in New Jersey," he said. "It’ll be easier to get to Jersey City than it will be to get to New York, which is not the case now…It’s like what the interstate did. It just made two places that always seemed far apart suddenly very close to each other."

On Wednesday, NJ Transit’s board will vote to contract a Morristown-based engineering firm to begin work on a final impact statement that reflects the now-preferred Hudson-Bergen light rail compromise that calls for the line to stop at Route 4 (South Englewood), Englewood Town Centre and Englewood Hospital, the new end of the line. 

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