New Jersey residents just got slammed with more bad news this month. The Washington D.C. based, industry-funded transportation research organization TRIP released a report which found that the poor condition of New Jersey’s roads and bridges cost Garden State drivers a whopping $1,951 a year.

This figure is considerably higher than the $605 reported last year by the American Society of Civil Engineers because TRIP takes into consideration congestion-related delay ($861 worth of lost time and wasted fuel) and traffic crashes ($485 in lost household and workplace productivity, insurance costs and other financial costs), not just additional vehicle operating costs (such as accelerated vehicle depreciation, additional repairs, and increased fuel consumption and tire wear).

The report astutely notes that New Jersey’s increase in population, vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) and economic growth over the past 22 years has placed an increased demand on the state’s road network. TRIP’s recommendations for future improvements, however, miss the mark.

Although TRIP’s report emphasizes the need to secure a long-term federal funding solution — MAP-21 will expire just four months from now — the report makes only a brief mention of  the state’s Transportation Trust Fund in a passing comment on debt service. Without identifying reliable long-term funding solutions on both the federal and state levels, New Jersey will not able to keep up with capital demands.

The report also leaves out the need to invest in improving rail freight. TRIP’s report found that 72 percent of the goods shipped annually from sites in New Jersey are carried by trucks and another 17 percent are carried by “multiple mode deliveries,” which include trucking. But if one intermodal train takes approximately 280 trucks off the road, and if a single 18-wheeler wreaks as much havoc on roadways as 9,600 cars, then each train can remove the equivalent of 2.7 million cars’ worth of wear and tear on New Jersey’s roadways.

Increasing rail freight options and getting trucks off the road will also increase safety; truck crashes are nearly three times more likely to result in a pedestrian fatality than crashes involving passenger vehicles, and major truck corridors are typically considered high-risk locations.

A final, major red flag: using Census and Federal Highway Administration data, TRIP estimates that by 2030, travel on New Jersey’s roadways will increase another 15 percent. Aside from the fact that the FHWA has acknowledged that their projections “substantially over-estimated” VMT growth in recent years, this estimation also ignores New Jersey’s growing bicycle network, its Complete Streets leadership status and its heavy reliance on transit, all of which have major implications on VMT projections.

Then again, what else should one expect from a report which actually recommends widening roads as a means of improving safety?