New Jersey DOT is proceeding with its Route 9 smart growth corridor project between Toms River and Tuckerton in Ocean County. A stated project goal is to end "the cycle of growth and [road] widening" that has failed to ease traffic congestion in New Jersey (or anywhere else).

The project has convened stakeholder groups of businesses, municipal officials and citizens to consider how and where future development should occur and to try to find transportation investments that can yield sustained benefits.

State DOT’s in congested areas would do well to standardize this approach. Consensus means a smoother path for projects through the approvals and planning pipeline, while the melding of transportation and development planning can keep road improvements from being eaten up by a general growth in traffic or by the plunking of a big box store next to a renovated interchange.

Other recent NJ DOT innovations include DOT scrapping the Millstone Bypass in favor of a small, far less expensive connector road and improvements to local intersections.  DOT also delayed the Hillsborough Bypass in winter, 2002 after deciding that its frequent interchanges would promote sprawl. The highway – a four-mile bypass to Route 206 in Somerset County – has been redesigned to eliminate two interchanges. Earlier this year, NJDOT transformed a long-held plan to extend Route 18 along the Shore in southeastern Monmouth County into a project to build a 20-mile bikeway.

NY State DOT says it is undertaking an internal reform, but has not taken any initiatives similar to the new NJ DOT projects in years. In the 1990’s, it began participating in a small number of "sustainable development studies" organized by NY Metropolitan Transportation Council staff in the Hudson Valley and Long Island. Some of these are integrating land use into DOT project considerations. But the agency has made no move to expand the approach or to introduce it upstate, despite language calling for the DOT to broaden such work in New York’s version of a smart growth policy — Governor Pataki’s under-developed "quality communities" initiative.

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