The NJ Turnpike Authority is in a bit of a cash crunch, unable to fund all of its plans to widen the Turnpike and Garden State Parkway. That seems to be leading to some desperate, and detrimental, actions.
NJTA announced last month that it wants to end off-peak toll discounts on the Turnpike for drivers whose EZ-Pass accounts are outside the NJ EZ-Pass system. Over half of drivers would be affected, including those with accounts through the Port Authority of NY & NJ. The discounts have had a measurable effect in reducing rush hour traffic, and ending them would be bad policy. NJTA will hold public hearings on the toll change, but hasn’t announced when those will be.
The authority has also come under fire over a tree-clearing project related to the Garden State Parkway widening. So many trees are being cut that State Sen. Jeff Van Drew (D-Atlantic) has said it “looks like we were strip mining.” He’s also blasted the agency for talking out of both sides of its mouth when explaining the project.
The agency previously referred to the tree clearing as a maintenance project, leading to concerns that it was trying to evade reforestation requirements (under state law, trees cut for state projects must be replaced elsewhere; maintenance projects are exempt). Only more recently did agency officials admit that the clearing was advance work for the planned widening of the Parkway between miles 30 and 64.5, even though that part of the project is currently unfunded.
Haste may make waste. An agency spokesperson told the Press of Atlantic City in February that “any actual work [on the Parkway] is so far away that some of the trees will probably have started to grow back by the time work begins on the widening.”
You forgot to mention that the Turnpike Authority or the NJDOT (I forget whom exactly) wanted to reroute founds dedicated to replant trees removed for the Turnpike widening.
I love how the financial crisis here in NJ and elsewhere is often used as an excuse to ditch good environmental and other quality-of-life policies even when they are mandated by law like the “No net loss” act that requires the replanting of trees removed in state projects.
Oh yeah. And no one ever checks to see if the trees they replant actual live either. On the Rt 1 / 130 interchange built a few years ago, just about every tree planted for that project died. And many of those were just shoved into one clover leaf (large tree species planted with in a handful of feet of one another) offering little landscape value if they were to actual live.
Oh. Sorry! You did mention it back in August. I guess I learned about that one from you guys. Still doesn’t excuse the lack of apparent follow up on the tree plantings when they die.
How many toll tickets does a toll collector have to issue to earn their salary? If the median toll collector costs us $60,000 be aware that most of them cannot ever earn even their salary… s there is no point in collecting tolls… just charge all residents a flat $50-100 annually and be done with this sorry mess. Do tolls exist just to provide jobs for toll collectors? Most of my NJTP tolls run between 35c and 70cents…
[…] March, the NJ Turnpike Authority announced it would seek to end off-peak toll discounts on the NJ Turnpike for drivers whose EZ-Pass accounts are outside the state’s EZ-Pass system. […]
[…] release seemed timed to deflect mounting criticism of the agency over a massive, ambiguous tree-clearing project along the Parkway which began earlier this year. State Sen. Jeff Van Drew had been vigorously […]