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New Jersey’s Roads Don’t Just Suck: They’re Massively Expensive, Too

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file photo by Boyd Loving
Check out your own state’s cost per mile with Reason Foundation’s Annual Highway Report.

Nick Gillespie|Dec. 7, 2015 12:09 pm

This new video uses data from Reason Foundation’s 21st Annual Highway Report to make a simple but devastating point: New Jersey’s roads are paved not with asphalt but wasted taxpayer dollars. (Disclosure: Reason Foundation is the nonprofit that funds this website.)

Indeed, according to the report, the Garden State spends way, way more than other states to maintain its roads:

South Carolina and West Virginia spent just $39,000 per mile of road in 2012 while New Jersey spent over $2 million per state-controlled mile. Rhode Island, Massachusetts, California and Florida were the next biggest spenders, outlaying more than $500,000 per state-controlled mile.

See where your state stacks up here.

Spoiler alert: if you live in California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Alaska, or Hawaii, you can suck it in terms of road costs and road quality. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Legislators in Jersey (and many other states) are eyeing ways to pay for more road construction. Recent polls show about 57 percent of Jersey residents are against a gas-tax hike even as five roadways popped up on a list of the “worst traffic bottlenecks” in the country.

Critics of Reason Foundation’s methodology counter that a fairer accounting of costs finds that Jersey spends “only”$270,000 per mile on its roads.

Yeah, maybe, but almost certainly not.

Jersey’s gas tax is a relatively cheap-o 14.5 cents per gallon while neighboring New York’s is a relatively whopping 45 cents per gallon. These taxes are supposed to fund capital road projects and maintenance but neither is accomplishing that basic task. Capital New York notes that while New Jersey’s transportation fund is wallowing in debt (about one-third of receipts go to debt service), New York’s fund is giving away money to a wide range of activities, with less than a quarter of receipts going to road projects. Give the state too little money and they need more; give it too much and they spend it on whatever they want to.

And there’s this for Jersey folks:

New Jerseyans pay an average $601 annually in extra repairs due to driving on roads in need of fixing, according to [Department of Transportation] data.

https://reason.com/blog/2015/12/07/new-jerseys-roads-dont-just-suck-theyre

For every $1 paid in NJ gas tax:

36 cents – Mass transit
23 cents – “Local System Support,” including regional planning and state aid for county and local roads
12.6 cents – Behind-the-scenes work on implementing the capital program, such as research, planning and design.
12 cents – Road upgrades, including pothole repairs, resurfacing, drainage, landscaping and environmental compliance
8 cents – Bridge maintenance, rehabilitation and replacement
3 cents – Support facilities, such as office buildings and highway rest areas
2 cents – Congestion relief, including road widening
2 cents – Safety improvements at intersections, railroad crossings, traffic signals, restriping highways
1 cent – Multimodal programs, including bicycle, pedestrian, ferry and freight programs
0.4 cents – Airport improvement program

Source: NJ Department of Transportation