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By RICHARD PEARSALL
Courier-Post Staff
CAMDEN
The last time a trolley rolled through the streets of this city was in 1937 when the street car to Clementon Lake made its final run.
As soon as next Monday, NJ Transit said, light rail will be back.
The agency will begin testing the diesel-powered cars of its Southern New Jersey Light Rail Line on the streets of Camden, from the Rand Transportation Center at Broadway to the Tweeter Center on the waterfront.
"We'll be testing the responsiveness of the in-track system that changes traffic signals," said Micah Rasmusen, a spokesman for NJ Transit, "as well as the clearance of the vehicle around curves."
The cars are not expected to begin running for real until sometime next spring, with the transit agency still reluctant to set a date for the opening of its $1 billion, 34-mile line from Camden to Trenton.
"We've already looked at braking, speed, things like that," Rasmussen said.
Tony Evans, a spokesman for Camden Mayor Gwendolyn Faison, announced the advent of testing to "alert the community," he said.
He said the mayor is looking forward to the opening of the line.
"It gives people another way to get into Camden," Evans said, mentioning the city's colleges and universities as likely destinations. It also helps Camden residents looking for employment, he said.
The mayors of other cities along the line are not so enthusiastic.
Palmyra Mayor Bob Leather, a Republican turned independent, said he has seen no evidence that the line is spurring development and fears it may actually be a " hindrance."
By adding a series of traffic signals at grade crossings, he said, it is slowing traffic both on Broad Street, his borough's name for the main artery that runs parallel to the tracks, as well as side streets.
Burlington City Mayor Herman Costello, a Democrat, uses stronger terms to express his disappointment in how things have worked out. He complains bitterly about the 70 parking spaces and room for cars to maneuver that his city's historic downtown has lost.
"If I'd had the remotest idea of what this was going to mean, I'd have fought it like hell," the mayor said.
Officials in Riverside, Delanco and Beverly are more optimistic that the line will fulfill its promise of spurring economic development.
Riverside, in particular, looks to the line to help attract investors to turn the old Watchcase Factory and the brownfields around it into a complex of apartments, offices, shops and parkland.
Mark Remsa, the chief planner for Burlington County, sees it as a "factor" in attracting development to the Route 130 corridor as well as to the riverfront.
"You can't see light rail in isolation," said the longtime advocate of the riverfront line. "You have to see it as one of the pieces in the economic puzzle."
NJ Transit turned to the riverfront as a route for a light rail line in South Jersey in 1996 after alternate paths with higher ridership projections ran into local opposition.
Fearing it would not be able to obtain federal funding because of relatively low ridership, the state decided to fund the project itself through borrowing.
After Gov. James E. McGreevey took office and installed a new regime, NJ Transit turned on the project, calling it ill-advised and poorly planned, but vowing to do its best to complete it and make it work.
"The only thing worse than spending this kind of money on a project like this," Transportation Commissioner Jamie Fox said, "would be to spend money on a project like this and then not use it."
The transit agency has quietly reduced opening day ridership projections for the line from the 9,000 fares a day originally predicted to 6,000.
It is working with Burlington County to bring more riders to the line through bus shuttles that will link the line with spots as close as Route 130 and as far away as Mount Laurel and Mount Holly.
James Resta, a transportation planner for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, said the only way those kind of offshoots will work is if "the shuttles run frequently and the connections are perfect."
It is a standard rule of mass transit, he said, that " every time you ask a person to change you lose half your ridership."
A better investment, Resta said, is to spur development in the vicinity of the rail stations. Remsa agrees.
Burlington County and the DVRPC collaborated on a plan to encourage the creation of so-called transit villages in seven communities, from Palmyra to Burlington City.
The study, released in March 2002, urges towns to increase residential density and commercial enterprises in ways that capitalize on existing assets and characteristics.
It sees Burlington City as a "historic community," Riverside as a "strong central business district," Riverton as a "classic small town," and Palmyra as a "19th-century railroad town."
Reach Richard Pearsall at (856)-486-2465 or rpearsall@courierpostonline.com