NJ TURNPIKE:In Search Of Bottlenecks

Ed Gross the exec-dir says he’s confident that a lot of these toll plaza backups will disappear quickly after Sept 30’s introduction with electronic tolling (ET): “I think the improvement will be very significant. The queuing during the peak hours will be materially reduced.”

That’s what the turnpike’s traffic consultants have predicted. Being part of the E-ZPass interagency group, and the last of five New York/Northern NJ toll agencies to fire up ET they’ll have a existing huge population of transponders to draw on to get a high usage rate quickly. In addition they will begin with a financial incentive to motorists to get transponders rather than pay cash.

Great though E-ZPass may be, it will be in the nature of something as complex as a major highway to throw up new challenges. Robert F Dale, director of operations and a Turnpike veteran, says he has a list of improvements he’d like to see to smooth flows on the turnpike independent of the toll plazas. Major present problem areas exclusive of the toll plazas are a lane drop from 14 to 12 lanes through IC-13 in Linden where the approaches to the Goethals Bridge (I-278) made the continuation of 13th and 14th lanes prohibitively expensive. Another point of turbulence is the rather abrupt reduction in lanes south of IC-8A from 10 to 6-lanes where the dual-dual roadway format ends.

“I could list a whole lot of areas where from a strictly operations perspective I’d like to see extra lanes now,” he says. But he wants to wait and see how traffic flows change with improved toll plaza throughput before he’d recommend any priorities for new mainline works.

Holiday peaks

They all emphasize that a major change in recent years has been the enormous growth of holiday traffic, especially on the southern section of the Turnpike. The variance between maximum and average daily traffic is much greater down south. Dale provided us with link volumes for the Turnpike’s busiest day last year – Nov 24, the day before Thanksgiving – and annual average daily traffic (AADT) for 1999. Total trips on the Turnpike Thanksgiving last (Nov 24 ) reached an all-time high of 724k vs 588k average annual daily trips, a 1.23 multiple.

The busiest leg IC-13 to IC-13A in the ports area of Elizabeth has AADT of 223k but Nov 24 traffic was 275k, the same holiday multiple of 1.23. Whereas the Turnpike has four out of its 33 links with over 200k veh/day AADT, it gets 8 links with that volume at Thanksgiving. But the further south you go on the Turnpike the larger the holiday multiple to average traffic becomes.

The southernmost three links IC-1 to IC-4, (Salem county on the southern fringe of Philadelphia’s spillover into southern Jersey) see AADTs in the range 40k to 50k, but Thanksgiving traffic 82k to 94k, a holiday multiple of about 2.0. What is normally the most free-flowing part of the Turnpike becomes the worst gridlock.

20-mile (32km) backups and walking speed traffic happens on these holidays and several times a year they suspend toll-taking and use highway advisory radio and portable message signs between IC-7A and IC-4 to try and get southbound traffic to bail out of the Turnpike. They do what they call ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ diversions – soft when the just advise them, and hard when they’ll suspend tolltaking and close the Turnpike for a while to force traffic off.

It’s a tough call what to do about a roadway that attracts double average traffic on major holidays. 40k to 50k veh/day AADT is nicely accommodated on this 2x2-lane motorway, but 90k, the holiday volumes, really stretch it. Regular toll rates go nowhere near supporting a widening to 2x3-lanes. Maybe they should model the traffic and revenue numbers for a holiday premium toll? At least for the worst hours.

One unusual aspect of this southern section of the Turnpike is that from IC-7 in the southern part of Trenton 90km (55mi) to the Delaware River the Turnpike is closely paralleled by I-295, a tax-financed motorway. At its furthest in Swedesboro I-295 is 10km (6mi) distant but mostly it is closer than that and in places runs virtually alongside the turnpike. It serves more local traffic having 25 interchanges to 7 on the Turnpike, but to a considerable extent when I-295 gets congested, the Turnpike takes spillover and acts as a toll express road. When I-295 is free-flowing there is little advantage to paying the toll and taking the Turnpike. That could be another reason the Turnpike has such low average year-round traffic volumes in the southern section.

Gateway to Jersey

The immediate bottleneck is IC-1 the mainline toll plaza at the far southern end of the Turnpike close by the Delaware Memorial Bridge. It’s a 15-lane plaza with 4 or 5-lanes northbound for patrons to get their entry tickets form ticket dispensing machines and up to 11 toll lanes for toll payers exiting southbound. The 11 lanes are nowhere near enough in the holiday peaks.

Design work is underway on a grand new Interchange One (IC-1 doesn’t have quite the same ring) to be a ‘Gateway to New Jersey.’ To be located 2km (6400') north of the existing IC-1 at Carney’s Point the new plaza will have 23-lanes – 7 ticket-picker lanes northbound and 16 pay-lanes southbound. An artist’s concept (above) shows the $35m plaza with a substantial windowed building atop the toll lanes with a solid 2-story stone central admin building fronting onto a large formal reflecting pool and lawns in a median park. The toll collectors will descend to their toll booths in five elevators that provide vertical architectural accents. The whole structure is punctuated by a tower, a cross between an airport style control tower and a lighthouse with some kind of observation deck that soars well above the rest of the 10m high (35') structure. Officials say the state wants a signature gateway and that the NJ Council on the Arts is advising on its design.

A group called Ecoplan is the concept designer, Zorab Vosganian & Assoc are architects and Louis Berger & Assoc engineers for what is likely to be a $35m project. Officials say a decision has not yet been made whether to do open road tolling through the new IC-1. They aren’t sure whether the volume of traffic with E-ZPass will justify electronic toll express (ETX) lanes so it may be opened without them. In any case, says John Kunna, the turnpike’s chief engineer, the overhead structure and plaza layout is designed so that the central lanes each side can be easily be organized for ETX lanes.

Busiest legs

The Turnpike has four links with over 200k veh/day AADT. These are all, interestingly, south of the Mixing Bowl IC-14 (I-78) and are those alongside Newark Airport and the seaports on either side of IC-13A in Elizabeth south to IC-12 in the Carteret-Rahway area. This stretch of 14-lanes is one of the world’s most spectacular nightime techno-industrial landscapes of airliners landing and taking off close-by and parallel to the busy highway, with huge container cranes on the other side, and then to the south a magnificent display of oil refineries and petrochemical works with shimmering cat crackers and mazes of pipes and storage tanks set off by billowing clouds of steam and fiery flameoffs of industrial gases. It drives anti-industrialists crazy.

So this busiest section of the Turnpike is centered on the ports of Elizabeth and Newark airport and the connections to Staten Island, not as might be imagined further north in the Meadowlands and the approaches to the Hudson River Crossings to Manhattan. The Turnpike’s newest interchange IC-13A – opened in the early 1980s – is in the middle of all this providing access to the southside of the airport via one of the shortest stretches of motorway NJ-81. There’s talk of a new interchange, IC-13B?, between IC-13A and 14 to serve the ports better, perhaps a trucks-only IC.

The Turnpike’s most active capital project is the Secaucus IC located on the Eastern leg of the split section of the turnpike in the Meadowlands swamp area about a mile east of the Hackensack River. Intended to service a rail passenger station a park-&-ride, rail freight yards and an office complex it will have 9 toll lanes. The project which produces a short spur to the east is mostly structural, and a lot of loops, and is expected to cost $235m of which construction will be about $185m.

Final design work is now under way and construction is due to begin by the spring of 2001.

The Secaucus IC spur is being designed so it can readily be extended further east to connect to the major north-south arterial US-1&9, or even right to the Jersey City waterfront of the Hudson River. The Jersey City mayor, Brett Schundler has been promoting the use of an abandoned railroad right of way known as the Bergen Arches which is an amazingly deep mix of cuttings and short tunnels through the Pallisades ridge. Schundler sees an urban motorway connection to the NJ Turnpike and the rest of the northern NJ highway network as a powerful tool to encourage further redevelopment along the Hudson River. (TRnl#29 July 98 p1) The last decade saw an impressive bunch of glamorous new buildings with great views of lower Manhattan built there, but the opportunities for more are considerable.

Princeton Spur

The NJ-92 spur from the turnpike at South Brunswick’s IC-8A, 10km (6mi) to US-1 north of Princeton remains mired in USEPA-Army Corps permitting process, which started in 1995. In Sept 1996 the Turnpike filed its first wetlands application. The USEPA and Army Corps have drawn out the process requiring rpeated studies and changes. Last year they claimed the “purpose and need” of the project had not been demonstrated.

Ed Gross says the Turnpike and the Whitman administration remain fully committed to the project. Gross strongly disagrees with the USEPA claim that upgrade of a surface and signalized arterial road would suffice: “We demonstrated that our solution was far more effective in moving traffic off local roads and put it on the Turnpike where it belongs. By every measure except one, our solution had less environmental impact than the upgrade of local streets.

USEPA refused the permits last year and removed the project from state jurisdiction. Now the Army Corps of Engineers is handling a new permit application from the Turnpike and has embarked on a new environmental impact process. An extraordinary aspect of the new review is that it is being carried out by consultants appointed by the Army Corps. Normally state DOTs or the turnpikes appoint consultants for such studies. (Contact Lynn Fleeger 732 247 0900,1x5601)