BY BARUCH FEIGENBAUM
New Jersey Monitor
Anyone who drives the New Jersey Turnpike at rush hour knows the feeling. Traffic slows to a crawl. Brake lights stretch for miles. What should be a short commute becomes an hour of stop-and-go frustration. That’s because New Jersey ranks 50th, dead last in the nation, in urban traffic congestion, a new study of every state’s roads finds. On average, New Jersey drivers waste about 85 hours a year, more than two full workweeks, sitting in gridlock.
These traffic jams come with real economic costs. Time spent stuck in traffic reduces productivity, increases fuel consumption and emissions, and raises shipping costs for businesses and prices for consumers. It also makes daily life harder for commuters just trying to get to work or home to their families, to stores, and to activities. But congestion is only part of the story.
Reason Foundation’s 29th Annual Highway Report, which grades state highway systems on 13 categories, including bridge safety, traffic fatalities, pavement conditions, and spending efficiency, ranks New Jersey 40th in the nation for overall highway cost-effectiveness and road conditions. That is worse than the state’s 34th overall ranking last year, but a major improvement over New Jersey’s last- and near-last-place finishes in the overall rankings for several years before that.
When you look at nearby states, there are reasons to worry. While New Jersey is 40th out of 50 states, Connecticut has improved its system to the 7th-best road performance and cost-effectiveness in the country. Delaware ranks 32nd, Maryland 34th, and Pennsylvania 36th. New Jersey only manages to beat New York, which ranks a dismal 47th.
For a dense state with one of the nation’s most heavily used transportation networks, New Jersey’s ranking underscores its persistent challenges with congestion, pavement quality, and spending. New Jersey performs reasonably well in some categories, particularly safety. It has the 14th-lowest rural traffic fatality rate and the 16th-best urban traffic fatality rate. It also ranks 17th in rural interstate highway pavement condition, but falls to 42nd out of 50 states in urban interstate highway pavement condition and 41st in urban arterial road pavement condition.
Bridge conditions are closer to the middle of the pack. New Jersey ranks 27th nationally in the percentage of bridges that are structurally deficient, but 44th in capital and bridge disbursements, meaning the state spends far more per road and bridge project than all but a handful of states. That spending should result in better pavement quality and up-to-par bridges.
Unsurprisingly, the other biggest problems for New Jersey’s road system are on the spending side, where taxpayers pay a lot for the 40th-ranked system. New Jersey ranks 42nd in maintenance spending, which includes costs such as repaving roads and repairing potholes.
Spending more is not necessarily a problem if the results are outstanding, but as anyone who has driven on the state’s bumpy roads knows, that isn’t the case.
Politicians and officials will rightly point to the state’s higher cost of living, harsh winters, proximity to New York, and other factors as reasons for higher-than-average spending. But that explanation only goes so far, and the state should continue to reform how projects are prioritized and how transportation dollars are spent.
Improving New Jersey’s highway system does not require reinventing transportation policy. If the state wants to improve quickly, ensuring spending produces smoother pavement on urban roads and fewer structurally deficient bridges would yield significant gains.
In the longer term, reducing traffic congestion has to be near the top of the state’s list. Smart investments in added capacity, better traffic management, and more effective use of technology could move drivers through some of the state’s worst bottlenecks, helping the state’s economic productivity and competitiveness.
New Jersey’s highway system is one of the busiest in the country. Millions of people rely on it every day, and businesses depend on it to move goods across the Northeast. For a state with such a critical transportation network, New Jersey has made some solid gains in recent years, but still has a lot of work to do.
