MTR 312, NJ Plan Round-Up: Good, Bad, Irrelevant?

Issue 312

April 9, 2001

NJ Plan Round-Up: Good, Bad, Irrelevant?

Revisions to New Jersey's State Plan may give smart growth and transportation reform advocates more ammunition to press NJ DOT to emphasize road maintenance and mass transit. However, the help will be mostly of a moral nature, since state agencies routinely ignore the plan, and it has no enforcement provision.

"The maintenance and repair of the existing transportation network is the highest transportation priority," says the Plan. Compare to the capital budget NJDOT has drafted in the face of state legislation establishing ambitious roadway maintenance goals - DOT actually reduced the maintenance spending it had previously projected for 2002, while slating tens of millions of dollars for so-called "strategic mobility" highway capacity projects (MTR #307).

The State Planning Commission also reiterated its commitment to making it more difficult for NJDOT to build bypasses to attempt to deal with traffic congestion. Bypasses have to jump these hurdles:

The bypass separates regional through traffic from local traffic.
Access is limited.
It minimizes sprawl.
It minimizes adverse impacts on adjacent communities.
Alternative circulation patterns using existing roads are not feasible.

In what may be a subtle change, the State Planning Commission dropped its controversial language about "consistency with the policy objectives of the planning area," in its section on bypass highways. That language promoted the linkage of "centers" via new roads. Route 92's backers used it to promote the highway's construction, even though it would do more to draw development away from real centers such as Princeton, New Brunswick and Trenton and toward open spaces in South Brunswick.

Whittling away at the "link centers" language and further curtailing bypasses is important because NJ DOT is planning an ambitious slate of bypasses including Rtes. 182 (Hackettstown), 206 (Lafayette), 15 (Lafayette, Sussex Co.) in the sensitive Highlands region, and Millstone Bypass (West Windsor), and the following "missing links:" Rtes. 18 connection to I-287 (Piscataway), 21 (Newark), 206 Bypass (Hillsborough), 31 (Flemington), 29 (Trenton Riverfront), 33 Bypass (Freehold).

But it's not all good news from the new State Plan. Backers of the latest subsidy for trucks - "Portway" - inserted language in the Transportation Policy on Goods Movement (section 23) calling for provision of "exclusive rights-of-way congestion bypasses for local port and distribution activities and regional movement of trucks."