NJ TURNPIKE:USEPA botches redesign

The USEPA last year suggested to the New Jersey Turnpike Auth (NJTA) a different alignment for its long proposed NJ-92 spur west from the mainline at IC-8A to US-1 just north of Princeton. The road is designed to move some of the heavy traffic off local roads and onto the Turnpike. The NJTA had gone through ten years of study of alternatives, and public hearings, and made changes to reduce impacts on wetlands. After requesting a whole further list of items to be studied the federal regulators last year suggested the link be jogged south to join an existing county distrubutor and be downgraded from a 2x2-lane motorway to a surface arterial.

A year, some $500k in expenses, and consultants reports that fill a 4” binder later the USEPA’s redesign of NJ-92 has been thoughly analysed.

The consultants find that the USEPA proposal show doesn’t save any money as compared to the Turnpike’s proposal. It affects 79 houses compared to none in the Turnpike scheme. It takes 47 acres of parkland, affects historic houses and a church, involves 7 stream crossings vs 4, and will leave much more through traffic on local streets. And whereas local governments nearby accept the Turnpike alignment, they say they’ll fight the USEPA route like crazy. Finally the USEPA proposal, because it involves a non-access controlled road rather than a motorway is liable to spawn commercial strip development that environmental regulators say they are opposed to. The sole respect in which the USEPA alignment is superior is in reducing wetlands impacts — 6 vs 11 acres.

74k veh/day have the potential to use the NJ-92 spur modeling showed, but the key to attracting vehicles is offering time savings as compared to local roads. Other things being equal, traffic goes the fastest way. By designing a road that meanders south and has traffic signals along it, the USEPA ensured it would attract substantially less traffic that the NJTA mwy design and more direct route — 25k vs 32k veh/day. And even accepting lower traffic levels and a lower level of service the USEPA design required 6-lanes vs 4-lanes for the NJTA design.

NJ has a distinctive design to speed traffic on the mainline of major signalized arterial roads. There is no left-turning from central left-turn lanes. On major arterials like US-1, all turning traffic is taken off to the right, either by a diamond or a ‘jug handle’ loop and those wanting to do a left join waiting cross traffic. It makes for a more compact faster moving mainline, and allows a short simple two-phase traffic signal. A further advantage may be that it is easier to upgrade the roadway to mwy standard because the intersections have some of the footprint of proper interchanges.

Despite designing the USEPA alternate with such efficient NJ-jug’andles (see above) the modeling showed the USEPA alignment would take 23% less traffic from local roads than the NJTA plan.

Hate cars more than love environment

Unfortunately the US Congress has given enormous powers to the USEPA which is laughably incompetent in transp planning as indicated by this incident. But its clumsy intervention seems to be part of a developing pattern of opposition to high standard roads. Other examples:

— Connecticut/Rhode Island where federal enviro regulators (USPA and Corps of Engineers) have blocked efforts to finish a high quality road between Hartford CT and Providence RI along US-6

— Montgomery Co MD where the USEPA grossly mischaracterized state plans for the Inter-County Connector (ICC) and vetoed all motorway standard alignments

— Twin Cities MN where the fed green police stopped a new bridge over the St Croix River at Stillwater and its proposed upgrade of MN-36 after $10m had been spent on preliminary works

In all these four cases the USEPA opposes a motorway standard improvement and suggests existing roads be improved. Trouble is motorways are generally safer, more efficient, less intrusive and better environmentally than piecemeal upgrades and widenings of surface roads.

In Montgomery Co MD Glenn Harper, a doctor who is active in a pro-ICC citizens group has a set of slides he shows of how front yards, trees and streams are being paved over in piecemeal widenings of local roads and how ugly commercial strips have been encouraged — all because the county lacks a single high standard east-west roadway north of the Washington Beltway. He points out that a 6-lane “parkway” (a motorway in a wide enough reservation to allow good landscaping) can avoid the need for many times the mileage of widening of signalized arterials into people’s front gardens and the felling of roadside trees and shrubbery, while providing much greater safety and less noise and exhaust emissions.

In Connecticut and Rhode Island there has been a longrunning battle by the states to get fed permits to upgrade US-6 to motorway standard. In CT the ploy has been studies, more studies and more studies still. In Rhode Island the enviro regulators opposed a US-6 at motorway standard on the ground that it would be in the watershed of the drinking water reservoir of Providence RI. But so is the existing US-6.

Which is more likely to have a gasoline tanker crash, rupture and pollute the watershed — a winding, overcrowded, multi-purpose roadway with housing and businesses abutting it, or a newly engineered access controlled, grade separated divided roadway on a newly selected alignment?

The answer seems so obvious as to lead to the conclusion that these regulators love the environment less than they hate motorways. And they must think motorists just deserve to sit in traffic.

Courts

Good news is that the courts have recently been reining in the federal regulators. June 19 the US Court of Appeals DC threw out the US Corps of Eng “Tulloch Rule” used for the past 5 years to bolster an extremist interpretation that virtually all construction in waters deemed to be US are subject to regulation. The Tulloch rule defined as a regulatable “discharge” any dredge or other material disturbed during construction which fell back where it came from. The law says the regulators can only regulate materials which constitute an “addition” or a “discharge” to “waters of the US” but the regulators have been stretching the terms to cover even small fallbacks of material being removed. This has wrought havoc with port channel maintenance but has also been used to threaten farmers, developers and even construction work in rivers and wetlands.

The appeals court in Nat Mining Assoc vs Corps of Eng ruled that the regulators had exceeded their legal authority saying that where there is fallback incidental to withdrawal of material, there “cannot be a discharge” and hence is no grounds for regulation. The ruling throwing out Tulloch was unanimous.

The other recourse that road agencies have against obstructionist Washington whimsy is an appeal under the US Administrative Procedures Act under which “arbitrary and capricious” decisions by federal regulators can be set aside by the courts. Business and citizen groups have made use of this law. Careful maintenance of a record of all the twists and turns of regulators showing the basis for such a case can sometimes be enough to get the regulators to give up and go prey on less resourceful and tenacious victims. (Contact Ed Gross NJTA 732 247 0900, Mark Foran ConnDOT US-6 860 594 2925, Glenn Harper Advocates for ICC MD 301 982 7947, Rob McFarlin MNDOT 612 296 0369, Bonner Cohen EPA Watch 202 739 0179)