NJ:Trucks Bans

US-206 which goes from the Atlantic City Exwy near Hammonton, via Trenton, Bedminster, Netcong, crosses the Delaware R in the far north of the state before hitting I-84 just inside PA. It is a major spinal corridor linking southern and central NJ to upstate NY, Ontario and Quebec. NJ-31 is NJ’s link to I-80, and NJ-31 follows the Delaware R up to I-78. These are important links to PA and the mid-west.

US-40 is an east-west route between the southern Jersey coast originating near Atlantic City and proceeding almost straight west 120km to New Castle Delaware via the twin spans of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. It continues on west through MD, so closely paralleling I-95 and then I-70 that it has been neglected there as the side-road to the interstate. But in NJ it has nothing resembling a modern highway anywhere near it, and it attracts a lot of heavy traffic. It saves 60km as compared with taking the Atlantic City Expressway and the NJ Turnpike (120km vs 180km). I traveled US-40 in NJ recently. About the only good thing about it is the condition of its pavement. It is a single 3.5m lane each way except for a couple of stretches with a third center turn lane, and a short 4-lanes divided on the far western end before the Del Memorial Bridge. The greater part of the length has no access control so it goes through the middle of town after town, and in addition to going right through the middle of all the towns, outside them it has attracted a huge amount of roadside business so about half of its whole length is a extended commercial strip. It is a classic mixed-up highway – mixing up local traffic with browsing traffic with longdistance through traffic. With all those roadside businesses along it, it is visually busy, cluttered, stressful to drive on and almost certainly has a high accident rate. And it’s slow – about 35 to 40mph on a weekday afternoon – because there is no overtaking and it flows at capacity most of the day. Roads like US-40 are so screwed up it is difficult to know how they can be improved except by building a completely new modern highway parallel.

Also the subject of proposed truck bans are NJ-47 an extension of NJ-55 fwy between the Philly metro area and the Cape May area at the southern tip of Jersey. East-west routes mentioned as coming under the truck ban are NJ-518 and US-202. These are both part of routes originating in PA which skirt the northern part of the Philly area and cross the Delaware into NJ at New Hope PA. US-202 is the logical link to I-287 at Somerville and up the western fringe of the NY/nNJ metro area to New England. NJ-518 heads for the US-1 corridor and the ports of nNJ as well as NY City.

These are important truck routes. NJ-31 and US-206 is used by over 2,000 18-wheelers/day. The Whitman admin says it wants these trucks to “stay on the interstate and the turnpike.” Trouble is these are a long way around for many trips, and there are major trucking costs in forcing them out of these routes.

Some of them might be financeable as truck toll routes?