JOISIE NJ Turnpike gets serious about toll flexibility

JOISIE

NJ Turnpike gets serious about toll flexibility

About 8 or 9 generations ago central Jersey was the scene of critical military triumphs by general George Washington — his bold “Victory or Death” night crossing “in a storm of wind, hail, ice and snow” of the Delaware river just upstream of what is now the I-95 bridge to march on Trenton and rout the Hessian mercenaries of the British as they lay unguarded with hangovers from Christmas-day rum. Col Johann Rall the Hessian commander in Trenton had foolishly scoffed beforehand at suggestion they build serious defenses: “Let zem come. Vee vant no trenches. Vee vill go at zem vizz zee bayonet” only to find his 1,500 unprepared professional soldiers no match for the 2,400 prepared Americans backed by 18 cannon who appeared out of nowhere executing a classic artillery-supported pincer assault as dawn broke. Rall, mortally wounded, was gracefully treated by Washington according to a classic painting but later 1,000 of his elite Hessians were captured and paraded as POWs through the streets of Philadelphia amid jeers. A week after Trenton Washington again outflanked and surprised the British at the battle of Princeton NJ, a pair of victories that while of merely tactical immediate importance had a strategic impact on American morale. They were a dramatic turnaround from the sad string of previous defeats, retreats and fiascos in New York and Canada. Trenton and Princeton gave the revolutionaries a conviction they could win, while inducing in the British commanders an enduring tactical caution that was to prove fatal over the longer term of the conflict.

These days the “wars” in central Jersey are about development, wetlands, roads and truck traffic, but again NJ on the western edge of the 18m pop New York area is of strategic importance to the contentious issue of traffic and pricing. In Trenton this month Gov Christie Whitman who has worked hard to gain a reputation for being politically as middle as middle-of-the-road-can-be announced a transport policy “Vision” that downplays road construction and emphasizes pricing. Her commissioner for transp John Haley was telling journalists that variable toll rates on the area’s bridges and highways need to be used to make more efficient use of the major facilities and relieve pressures on local roads once electronic tolling is in place. That’s a bit more than a year away.

Meanwhile the NJ Turnpike exec-director Edward Gross is presenting to his board a plan to offer off-peak discounts to commercial accounts at the turnpike — to be implemented within days.

The plan will provide for discounts on monthly commercial accounts on trips outside rush hours of:

• 15% or the first $200

• 12.5% $200 to $500

• 7.5% beyond $500

So total discounts will be 13.5% at $500/month and 10.5% at $1,000/mth. They will operate for all trips made outside rush hours as defined by 7am to 8.30am and 5pm to 6.30pm weekdays.

Gross, in telephone interviews, told us the immediate move to offer truck traffic non-peak hour discounts is an effort to start the process of change promptly. The Turnpike is working with the New Jersey Motor Truck Association to persuade more trucks to abandon crowded parallel unpriced routes and get on the turnpike.

“The traffic on US-1, and US-130 and other roads in central Jersey has become quite intolerable and we are working with the commissioner (of transp) and the governor to try and relieve the situation by attracting significant numbers of trucks off those roads and onto the turnpike. We most of all want to attract the 18-wheelers. So we’re trying a discount for our commercial account customers out of rush hours. There is no discount during the rush hours because we do not want to aggravate the situation for commuters,” Gross told us.

To satisfy bond deeds a worst case financial scenario shows overall revenues won’t be reduced by more than 1%, the slack the bond trust documents allow. Gross thinks revenue may in fact stay the same or even be boosted slightly. But, he says, the principal aim is to move traffic and relieve congestion, not raise revenue.

Commercial account off-peak discounts

Commercial account patrons currently present a magstripe card to the toll collector who swipes it, so the trips are already recorded by time and date, and the discounts will be a simple software adjustment in the accounting system. The turnpike has 1,600 commercial accounts now, less than 25% of its truck traffic, but hopes to increase that substantially with the incentive of the offpeak discounts.

One reason Gross is moving forward confidently with the scheme is that it has strong support from NJ truckers representatives. The NJ Motor Truck Assoc has promised to help the turnpike market the program to its members. Gross says he just didn’t have the time to get the normal consultants’ report. He wanted to move quickly in tune with the governor’s new sense of urgency. But the longer term direction of the turnpike will, he hopes, be addressed by the turnpike’s traffic consultant Wilbur Smith Associates (WSA). They should be about half way through a comprehensive study of options for the future of the turnpike which, Gross says, is looking at variable toll rates, bulk use discounts and different ways of managing the toll system for better effect to take advantage of the new flexibilities of electronic tolling.

The commercial account discounts are an interim step, he says, but far bigger changes covering all classes of motorist will be possible once electronic tolling is in place next year and the Authority has had time to digest the WSA report.

COMMENT: A major problem is that the GOP governor has taken up an extreme anti-new highway stance and thinks that somehow spending vast amounts on rail projects is a solution for problems on the roads. She recently adopted a 12-year plan involving spending $30 billion including 7 new rail projects. Road work is to be limited to rebuilds and safety improvements to some 25 to 40 intersections that are “hot spots.” The only major state road works mentioned for this whole 12-year period are a Portway project (see a future TRnl) improving links between the Elizabeth port area and the major highways, conversion to motorway standard of the southern end of the Garden State Pkwy, 2 new interchanges on the NJ Turnpike and the NJ-92 spur from the turnpike to US-1 north of Princeton.

In a talk May 18 at Atlantic City on the new 12-year plan she repeated the anti-roads mantra: “We cannot build our way out of congestion. It’s been tried, and it doesn’t work.”

But the widening of the NJ Turnpike together with higher tolls in the late 80s has been extremely successful in reducing congestion. The NJ turnpike is one of the best flowing major highways in the nation, especially in its 12 and 14-lane sections. What works is a combination of pricing and enhanced capacity where motorists show they are prepared to pay for that capacity in tolls. Disappointingly Gov Whitman’s administration is saying nothing in these “vision” statements about the use of pricing to make better use of the underutilized HOV lanes on I-287 and I-80, or of building pay-express lanes on crowded, untolled NJ-3, I-280 and I-78 in northern Jersey. In south Jersey, on the eastern fringe of the Philadelphia area I-295 which parallels the NJ turnpike for 90km (55mi) is in terrible disrepair and is a candidate for a toll-based rebuild. The greatest new highway need, according to analysts, is to relieve congestion in central Jersey between Trenton and I-287. This is a 35km (22mi) stretch of “missing link” in I-95 where the NJ turnpike constitutes the only motorway standard road inland of the Garden State Pkwy. Because of the failure to complete I-95 through Mercer and Somerset cos the traffic between Philadelphia/Trenton and the northernNJ/New York area is forced to choose between the poorly connected and too easterly NJ Turnpike and US-130, US-1 and US-206 which are non-access controlled surface roads through the middle of towns carrying huge volumes of stop&go traffic. US-1 has been upgraded piecemeal with overpasses at several of the busiest intersections but it is in the main a mixed commercial distributor road. US-130 has little access control. I-95 as planned through this section was foolishly “de-designated” as interstate in 1979, but is needed more than ever, not least by the people of the area who have to put up with through traffic on their local roads.

The turnpike’s NJ-92 spur is a modest construction proposal to siphon traffic off US-130 and US-1 to the turnpike. This 11km (7mi) $300m spur in dispute with the regional office of the USEPA — which has designed its own alternate surface road! At least Gov Whitman expresses support for the NJ-92 project! Unfortunately the equally strong case for a toll link between Trenton and I-287 at Somerville along a US-206 alignment is not addressed, nor US-1 between I-95 at Trenton and the proposed NJ-92 link to the turnpike. Better connections to the turnpike, such as NJ-92, will neatly complement the price incentives of the off-peak discounts to attract trucks from crowded surface roads.

Taxing cars for transit & parks

But rather than go the pricing route Gov Whitman is mostly set on traveling the old higher-tax way. She is proposing a 7c/gal increase in the gas tax which is to go to statewide ballot in Nov. 2c/gal will go for parkland and most of the remaining 5c/gal for the expensive rail projects — which will have negligible impact on road conditions. Port Authority analysts say it is unreal to think any substantial amount of truck traffic from the port areas can be shifted to rail, because most of it only goes 400km (250mi) from the ports and it goes directly to warehouses only accessible by truck. The just-in-time modern economy, they point out, is based on warehouses and factories that deal in truck and van-sized loads. Trucks from the NJ ports have their loads delivered to their destination at, say, a Sony distribution center in New Stanton PA, just off the Penna pike near Pittsburgh the same day if the ship docked at Elizabeth NJ first thing in the morning. If the parts had to go by rail the trip would take 6 days rather than 6 hours.

But such is the suffocating grasp of ‘ole rail’ on the political imagination, it stymies sensible transp policies — even as radical notions of variable road pricing are being embraced. (Contact NJDOT Ed Gross 732 247 0900,1x5000 – who had nothing to do with the above comment by TRnl)