Transportation Systems

Travel Trends

Factors Affecting Travel Choice

Transportation and the Business Cycle

Energy and the Environment

Cover and Table of Contents

How are New Jersey's transportation systems serving the state's residents today?  Is transportation in New Jersey helping the state achieve the general goals of improving the environment and quality of life, bolstering the economies of its cities and towns and containing sprawl development?  Is the state's current mix of roads, mass transit service, and freight corridors optimal, or heading in the right direction needed to meet these goals?

These important questions have been difficult for policy makers, planners, academics, advocates and citizens to answer because the necessary data is infrequently compiled and rarely presented in a format useful for year-to-year comparison.  It is recorded and kept by dozens of state and federal agencies, from the U.S. Census Bureau to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

This report attempts to fill that information gap.  The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has identified dozens of metrics which help answer questions about the direction of New Jersey’s transportation systems, and collected them in this user-friendly, and graphic-rich document.

We intend it as a set of benchmarks from which progress toward a sustainable transportation system can be measured.  It is our intention to update the report every two years.

This effort is especially timely now.  New Jersey has charted several major new directions in transportation in recent years.  Since the mid-1990s, NJ Transit has been the eastern United States’ leader in developing new mass transit lines and capacity.  The New Jersey DOT has recently become involved in corridor planning in partnership with municipal governments to attempt to forestall the future generation of congestion-causing vehicle trips.

The affect of these policies on the real world of travel behavior and transportation conditions needs to be examined.  Global trends such as rising fuel prices, increased trade and shipping and vehicle emissions contributing to climate change also have strong potential to shape transportation trends and conditions, and need to be recognized and taken into account by political leaders, government agencies, the business community, municipalities and the citizenry.

In this first, 2006 report, we look back over several years to establish recent trends, to set a context for future developments.  Across the set of yardsticks here, we found that the range of years 1997-2004 allowed us to establish the widest consistent set of measures.  While not a conventional, round number of years such as a single decade, the period does take us far back enough — to the rough mid-point of the Whitman Administration and the end of the duration of the first federal transportation reform bill (ISTEA of 1991), for example — to provide a good perspective on recent history and a strong foundation for measuring transportation performance as we move further into the 21st Century.