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NJ Turnpike history and facts you didn’t know: Video
The New Jersey Turnpike is the most heavily traveled toll highway in the U.S. In 1951, it became the third modern-day toll road in the nation.
- Gov. Mikie Sherrill is considering merging the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and NJ Transit to address the transit agency’s decaying equipment.
- Sherrill appointed Kris Kolluri to lead both agencies as a first step toward better coordination and innovation.
- Proponents suggest that a merger could provide stable funding for NJ Transit, similar to the way a 2003 merger fixed the Driscoll Bridge.
When former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey decided to merge the Garden State Parkway with the New Jersey Turnpike Authority in 2003, one of the driving reasons was the desperate, decaying state of the Governor Alfred E. Driscoll Bridge in Woodbridge.
Now, it’s the desperate, decaying state of NJ Transit’s train equipment that is driving Gov. Mikie Sherrill to consider marrying the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and NJ Transit.
The first step in that direction was Sherrill’s unprecedented decision in January to appoint Kris Kolluri to lead both agencies.
“We want to be innovative, we want these systems to work better, there’s too many stovepipes in this state, and this is exactly the kind of innovation we’re looking for,” Sherrill said in an exclusive interview with NorthJersey.com.
Story continues below photo gallery.
“Bringing the leadership into just one person, like Kris, who has great experience in both those agencies, I think could make us more nimble,” she said.
The first tests of this experiment have already occurred, with the historic snowstorms that hit the region in January and February, and the stormy planning chaos of hosting eight World Cup matches, including the final, in June and July at MetLife Stadium.
Though World Cup planning has been a years-long effort, Sherrill and her administration had to finalize the details and execute transportation for this massive event with less than six months on the job.
The governor said having Kolluri as a single point of contact about all things transportation has been invaluable, given the pace of her first 100 days.
“Having one person to turn to to say, ‘OK, this is what I want here, here and here’ and to have that expertise that Kris brought, but then also … instead of operating in silos, our biggest transit agencies are operating together,” Sherrill said.
The art of moving people
Sherrill’s announcement to have one person lead the two agencies came as a surprise.
She didn’t suggest it during her campaign for governor. In fact, it was her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, who campaigned on the idea to merge the Garden State’s transportation agencies.
Several advisers brought the idea to Sherrill during her transition period while interviewing candidates for Cabinet appointments.
But Kolluri — who had led the Gateway Development Commission and the state Transportation Department, a role that includes chairing four boards, including NJ Transit and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority — sold her on it.
Kolluri is now focused on aligning NJ Transit and the authority, showing how they can work together to weather snowstorms, plan for mega events like the World Cup, and share ideas, like the “LAND” plan. The plan, which involves cataloging all of an agency’s property to decide whether it could be sold, developed or better monetized, started at NJ Transit and is now taking shape at the Turnpike Authority.
But he’s also trying to change the narrative about the Turnpike Authority and NJ Transit — and show how they are inextricably linked despite how different they appear.
Without NJ Transit, hundreds of thousands of people would be in cars every day. Without the turnpike, commercial truck traffic would clog local roads, and would-be drivers could overwhelm the mass transit system.
“Each system looks, feels different, but they’re all doing the same thing — they’re moving people from point A to point B,” Kolluri said.
Sherrill wants to find innovative ways to improve state government, and an “out-of-the-box-idea” to have one person lead the Turnpike Authority and NJ Transit fit that philosophy, she said.
“We are focused on innovating, on moving the state forward, on addressing all the ways in which families have had a tough time with quality of life, and certainly transit was front and center,” Sherrill said.
‘Everybody told us you can’t do it’
More than two decades ago, another new governor looked for ways to be innovative, find efficiencies and fix problems that others couldn’t seem to fix: Jim McGreevey in 2002.
McGreevey needed to make urgent repairs to portions of the Garden State Parkway, especially the Driscoll Bridge, which crosses the Raritan River. But raising tolls on in-state drivers was a “third rail in politics,” said Paul Josephson, who was deputy counsel to McGreevey at the time.
So they decided to merge the money-losing parkway with the cash-cow turnpike.
“Everybody told us you can’t do it,” Josephson said. “It took the governor coming in to say, ‘We’re changing how we do business.’”
The idea came with efficiencies — such as eliminating 130 redundant positions in human resources, the law department and elsewhere — but the most important outcome was that decisions about spending would be made with a state-minded approach rather than the specific interests of one roadway.
“The notion of looking at combining agencies for the efficiencies, to combine funding streams, revenue streams, and to basically better utilize the toll money and the bonding capacity to service the various facilities — that was kind of top of mind for us,” Josephson said.
Would a capital fund ‘food fight’ be good or bad?
The biggest challenges were getting the unions on board and restructuring bond covenants that would go out to market again.
Josephson said it will probably be harder to fuse a transit agency with one that deals with highways, but they already have agreements in place to share money.
Since 2012, the Turnpike Authority has sent money to NJ Transit each year to help the state subsidize the mass transit agency’s budget. This year, the Turnpike Authority will send $470 million to help fill NJ Transit’s budget gap.
The Gateway rail tunnel project under construction beneath the Hudson River will also receive $500 million a year from the Turnpike Authority.
A complication of the merger is amending the state Transportation Trust Fund, which uses constitutionally dedicated gas and petroleum taxes to fund capital projects for NJ Transit and the state Transportation Department. Changing that could require a ballot measure.
Greg Lalavee, vice chair of the fund’s board and the business manager of International Union of Operating Engineers Local 825, said there could be some positive outcomes, but he’s concerned that merging the agencies and creating one big pot of money for capital projects would politicize how those dollars get spent.
“Merging the agencies, I think there’s some efficiencies that could be garnered there in terms of just the way things are bid,” Lalavee said. “On the other side of it, are we going to start to play politics in terms of winners and losers between roads, transit and capital operations?”
Josephson agreed there could definitely be “food fights” about which projects get dollars, but that could be a good thing.
“It makes everybody work a lot harder if you know that you have to justify what you are spending in order to get your project,” Josephson said.
The Turnpike Authority’s biggest projects have garnered significant attention recently for their costs, which had some questioning their need in the first place and whether the money could be better spent elsewhere.
An $11 billion program to widen the turnpike, with more lanes between Bayonne, Newark and Jersey City, is one of those controversies.
It was despised by environmentalists, who said the money should be spent on mass transit projects to relieve area congestion, as Bayonne residents compete with freight trucks going to and from the ports.
The Turnpike Authority’s data projected that the lane-widening would increase traffic more than if officials did nothing. Sherrill scaled back the program earlier this year.
The agency is also being scrutinized for awarding a $1.7 billion contract to TransCore to take over its E-ZPass tolling program, an amount that was $250 million higher than the bid from Conduent, the current provider.
Offering justification of the additional spending, the turnpike said TransCore’s bid score outperformed Conduent and that the agency valued the use of domestic labor, which led to higher costs. Conduent sued over the bid award; the company is represented by Josephson, a partner at Duane Morris LLP.
The harm of short-term thinking
Proponents of merging the agencies say it could help solve NJ Transit’s perennial funding problems, which have led to cost-cutting within the agency and a 21% increase in fares over the last three years come July 1.
“Commuters are already paying quite hefty rates for buses and trains right now, so there’s a natural limit to how much more you can ask commuters to spend before they’re either priced out of the market or they jump back in their cars,” Josephson said.
“Could turnpike toll revenue be part of the solution to transit’s funding problem? Absolutely, totally worth checking out, totally something that we should try and figure out whether it makes sense,” Josephson said.
Like all public transportation agencies in the United States, NJ Transit runs at a deficit every year and relies on state aid for support to keep fares affordable. But unlike many U.S. public transportation agencies, NJ Transit has never had constitutionally dedicated funding. So the aid it gets changes each year, making it hard to do long-term planning — especially for big expenditures like replacing rolling stock.
As a result, NJ Transit’s trains and locomotives — many of which date back to the 1950s through the 1980s — are breaking down at record numbers. Last year, 1,665 trips were canceled due to broken-down trains, a 174% increase since 2017, when 606 trips were canceled for the same reason.
Even paying for less costly items has proved challenging for the agency. In 2023, an application for a track expansion project through Harrison was withheld because NJ Transit couldn’t put aside money for its portion of the local match needed to apply for federal grants.
Band-Aid funding for NJ Transit isn’t working, said Sherrill.
“We’ve seen in previous administrations where there were these short-term decisions made,” she said. “In the long term, it really harmed commuters and quality of life and affordability here in New Jersey.”
Applying the ‘Maryland model’
New Jersey doesn’t have to look far to see how other transit agencies have welded money-making and money-losing transportation assets into one symbiotic organization.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority includes a division of tolled tunnel and bridge crossings, the New York City subways and buses, and two commuter rail operations.
And the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey oversees five airports, eight tolled bridges and tunnels, two bus terminals, the ports and the PATH transit system.
This concept is known as the “Maryland model” — named for the state that began consolidating its transportation agencies in the 1970s. Today, the Maryland Department of Transportation includes state highways and toll roads, ports, airports, bridges, tunnels, the Department of Motor Vehicles, commuter trains, light rail and bus networks.
John Porcari, who led Maryland’s Transportation Department from 1999 to 2003 and 2007 to 2009 and advised Sherrill on transportation issues during her transition to governor, said having one transportation fund gives the state financial flexibility to support the best projects that prioritize moving people around the state through a multi-modal perspective.
Without that, siloed agencies plan and invest precious capital dollars without thinking more holistically.
“As the state’s economy grows, as traffic congestion grows, as mobility gets harder by the day, you want every tool you can have in the tool kit, and one of them is to have a transportation system organizationally working together,” Porcari said.
“It’s amazing to me, from the outside, that [NJ Transit has] been able to subsist on uncertain and irregular contributions from the Turnpike Authority,” he added. “Financially, you can’t live that way.”
As the state’s population grows, and North Jersey becomes more congested, and traffic fatalities continue to outpace pre-COVID numbers, “more creative solutions will be needed,” said Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit that researches and advocates for transit in the tristate region.
“Figuring out what the mobility future of that part of the state is is really something this entity could take a leadership role in,” Wright said.
Would the Legislature get behind it?
A merger of agencies would require a study and would have to make financial sense, Sherrill said.
“Should we ever move in that direction, it would be because we looked at it from every single angle and decided that was going to get the best return on investment,” she said.
She also would have to sell the idea to the state Legislature, which would need to pass bills to make it happen.
Count state Sen. Paul Sarlo, who chairs the chamber’s budget committee, among the skeptics.
Sarlo told NorthJersey.com after an April 9 transportation budget hearing that he thought Kolluri “did a nice job of conveying to have this unified thought process of how to move people, whether it’s for DOT roadways, our toll roads or our mass transportation — and clearly he is capable of managing both these agencies.”
“But I don’t think we’re ready to combine those two agencies,” Sarlo added.
Not everyone feels that way.
State Sen. Vin Gopal, also a Democrat, introduced a bill with state Sen. Michael Testa, a Republican, to create a task force to study the idea.
And state Assemblyman Andrew Macurdy, a Democrat who represents commuter-heavy towns in Middlesex, Morris, Somerset and Union counties, introduced a bill with a proposal on how to accomplish a merger.
The freshman legislator wanted to tackle such a complex issue because he heard residents say, “’I don’t want to hear about partisan politics, I want to hear about solutions,’” Macurdy explained.
The bill would “make sure that we are making a holistic, comprehensive decision about how we’re doing our capital planning, our budgeting, making things go faster, more efficiently and more effectively,” Macurdy said.
“The appointment of Kris Kolluri to both NJ Transit and turnpike suggest at least a willingness to think in that same direction,” he said.
