Tri-State Transportation Campaign releases its Northern New Jersey’s Most Dangerous Roads for Biking report

Despite New Jersey's already great cycling and our states potential to be truly exceptional amongst its peers, the unfortunate reality is that the number of bicycle / motor vehicle crashes remains all too high.   The Tri-State Transportation Campaign took a simple and objective look at these crash numbers in northern New Jersey in a new report released this past Tuesday.  From the TSTC's blog:

TSTC’s new analysis, Northern New Jersey’s Most Dangerous Roads for Biking, highlights the 19,551 bicycle (bicycle and motor vehicle) crashes in 13 Northern New Jersey counties (Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren) that occurred from 2001 through 2011. Of these, 81 were confirmed fatal. The analysis supplements the 2011 TSTC report, Southern New Jersey’s Most Dangerous Roads for Biking.

The brilliance of this report is that it does nothing but simply map out the crash locations in each of the northern 13 New Jersey counties and lets the patterns speak for themselves.
   

Bergen County Bicycle Crashes 2001 - 2011.  TSTC.

From the TSTC's analysis it would seem that the crash rate correlates very closely with the population density of each county.

Also, as TSTC noted, a large percentage of these bicycle / motor vehicle crashes are on arterial roadways whether that might be in Essex or Hunterdon County and all others in between. This is something that most experienced cyclists know instinctively and try to avoid those roadways whenever possible, even in the most sparsely populated parts of the state.

This report is solid evidence that two things should be happening to make bicycle transportation in New Jersey much more safe:

1 – When at all possible, efforts must be made to make these arterial roadways safe for cycling whether that be shoulders, bike lanes, road-diets, cycletracks, etc. As for road diets, a good number four-lane roadways simply do not have the traffic volume to warrant the need for four lanes.  These could very easily be put on a road diet and bike lanes installed.  Elsewhere, other solutions will need to be explored.

2 – Wherever practicable, bicycle routes should be created that guide cyclists off of the arterial roadways and onto safer rural tertiary and urban residential roadways. New Jersey, unlike most other states, has great interconnected residential and rural tertiary roadway networks. Experienced cyclists know this and use this network to safely navigate all around the state. A well thought out and marked, MUTCD compliant bicycle route network could aid less experienced cyclists and those new or just traveling through New Jersey, to find safer routes off the major arterials, that still provide reasonably direct routes to their final destinations.

Again, thank you Tri-State for crunching and geo-coding the statistics.

PS - Could you use red push pins to highlight the fatalities next time?

Save the Date: MAP-21 Conference in New Jersey

The following comes to WalkBikeJersey from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

Months after the passage of a federal transportation bill, local communities, advocates, states, and even Washington are still sorting out what the new law means. To ease the transition and make sure that the legislation is used to create a more sustainable transportation network, Tri-State and Transportation for America are hosting Mapping It Out: A User’s Guide to MAP-21, an event for government officials, advocates, and the general public. The conference, which is being held at Rutgers’ College Avenue Campus on October 17^th, will:

• Explain the new federal transportation bill;
• Help government officials and advocates understand what they need to do to ensure that the law is implemented well; and
• Give a preview of upcoming federal decisions affecting transportation, from important upcoming deadlines to the work necessary to make the next transportation bill better than the current one.

Transportation for America Director James Corless and Policy Director Nick Donohue will both speak at the event.

Mapping It Out will be held from 9 am-12:30 pm in the Brower Commons Conference Room at Rutgers’ College Avenue Campus (145 College Avenue, New Brunswick, New Jersey). The event is free of charge, but attendees must RSVP to steven@tstc.org.

Tri-State maps South Jerseys most dangerous roads for cyclists

The following message was originally posted on the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia blog and contains significant portions from the original Tri-State Transportation Campaign press release. 

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has a released a new report that analyzes bicycle crashes in 8 South Jersey Counties from 2008-2010 to determine particularly dangerous roadways for cyclists. The report extracts NJDOT's public (but difficult to access) traffic crash data and geocodes all the bicycle crashes in the region on Google Maps.
 
The analysis shows that many crashes were clustered on specific roads, with certain roads the most dangerous in more than one county. US 30 was one of Atlantic and Camden Counties’ most dangerous roads (65 crashes in these counties combined). NJ 47 was one of Cape May, Cumberland and Gloucester Counties’ most dangerous roads (58 crashes in these counties combined).

The report's findings demonstrate the need for New Jersey to continue to examine the design of its streets, particularly the roads that have been shown to be hot spots for bicyclist crashes. The percentage of bicyclists in crashes on these “hot spot” roads ranged from 15.7% to 32.6% of each county’s total bicycle crashes.

NJDOT passed a statewide Complete Streets policy in December 2009 which requires new or rehabilitated roads to be built for all users, including walkers, cyclist, transit riders, and drivers.

"There is a clear demand for safe cycling routes in the state, yet most roads are still designed for only cars in mind,” said Matthew Norris, Tri-State Transportation Campaign's South Jersey Advocate. “We hope these numbers will help the New Jersey Department of Transportation and county officials fix these roadways to encourage healthier, more active lifestyles.”

"People need options for transportation. Not everyone drives a car, but our roads aren't accommodating to pedestrians and cyclists. They have every right to use the road but can't always do so safely. More attention needs to be paid to making our roadways not only safe, but inviting, so those who choose to travel by bike or on foot have their own established spaces can feel secure in using them,” said Patty Woodworth, owner of Action Wheels Bike Shop in Deptford.

County fact sheets and Google Maps can be found at http://tstc.org/njbiking.

The analysis found the following roads to be the most dangerous in the three suburban counties. Percentages are percent of bicyclist crashes in each county which happened on that road.
     
Burlington  

• Route 537-Marne Hwy/Camden Ave (7.6%)
• US 130 (6%)
• Burlington County 607-Church St (5.2%)

Camden 

• US 30-White Horse Pike (6%)
• NJ 168-Black Horse Pike (5.2%)
• Route 561-Haddon Ave/Haddonfield-Berlin Rd (4.5%)

Gloucester  

• NJ 47 - Delsea Dr. (10.1%)
• NJ 45 - Mantua Ave/Bridgeton Pike (9.6%)
• US 322 - Black Horse Pike (7.9%)

Note: much of the above text is taken from the press release issued today by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

The map below overlays TSTC's crash data on top of census data, trails and bike lanes in South Jersey. A full page version is viewable here.

View map on GeoCommons

Tri-State: NJDOT to spend more on highways and less on bike/ped projects

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign blog, Mobilizing the Region is reporting of a progressive trend that sees a greater percentage of money being spent on new roadways and increased highway capacity, and less of fixing already broken roadways and on transit (check out their excellent and informative article here).

The percentage of NJDOT's capital program going to road capacity expansion has significantly increased in recent years.

Source - Tri-State Transportation Campaign

Included near the bottom of the Tri-State article is an overview of the loss of funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects in New Jersey compared to the year before.  This year's loss in State bike./ped funding comes on the heels of loosing State funds for bike/ped projects for many years.  At this past year's New Jersey Bike/Ped Summit, I was told by very high authority, that NJDOT once had as much as $8 million in "Bikeways" funding compared to this years $3 million (note - I'm going on memory about the first number so I CANNOT definitively back that numbers up).

Tri-State even gave a run-down of the bicycle projects that will receive State funding and those that will go without.  Most notable, is the lack of funding for the New Brunswick Bikeway which would connect the College Avenue and Cook/Douglas Campuses as well as the New Brunswick Train Station.  While this project is expensive (it would also repave every road the bikeway is on), it also has the potential to see an extreme amount of use being that it would have provided a bicycling option for tens of thousands of college students, as well as faculty, staff and the other local residents.  The project is also 20 years in the making (YES!  20 years!), so it is extremely frustrating to see it left unfunded by the State.  It is not clear how the lack of State funding will effect this project or the others.

Tri-State releases Most Dangerous Roads for Walking - 2011

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign released its third edition of its report titled The Region's Most Dangerous Roads for Walking (2011).  Included with the 10 page report are a series of factsheets for each county in the area that the TSTC covers along with links to interactive Google maps showing the locations of the crashes and the hotspot roadways.  New Jersey gets special consideration by TSTC as it is the only state to have the crash data for all of its counties broken down.  


This map Middlesex Ped Fatals 2007-2009 is a sample of the interactive maps produced by TSTC.

While another superb report by TSTC, I have two small nits to pick with the rankings and the report itself. The report ranks the level of danger of a roadway by using the gross number of fatalities on a roadway without considering the length of the roadway.  I think knowing “fatalities per mile of roadway” is a much better metric for ranking the true danger each roadway presents to pedestrians.  Yes, 130 in Burlington County has a great number of pedestrian fatalities and this fact is of great cause for concern but it is also a fairly long stretch of roadway.  It may be that there are other roadways with less fatalities but are also shorter in length and therefore pose a greater threat to pedestrians per mile.

Also, the report is somewhat light on analysis.  The report does make some insightful observation, including:

• that 2/3rds of pedestrian fatalities happen on multi-lane roadways with higher speed limits,
• that these roadways often have little in accommodations for pedestrians,
• yet these roadways also have a great number of destinations that attract pedestrians.

However that is about the extent of it. There is no analysis into the cause of the crashes or the prevailing type of crash scenario.  I expected the interactive map to have more detailed information about the crashes (such as time of day, if the driver was drunk, if the pedestrian was drunk, was it a hit-and-run, was the pedestrian walking down the street, crossing the street, presence of a sidewalk, crosswalk, etc,.) possibly even a copy of the crash report but all that was given is the age of the pedestrian and the crash date.

Still, all this additional information may not even be necessary.  Just synthesizing the spacial relationship of crash locations alone and the ages of the victims paints a shockingly clear picture of where scares resources need to go.  The report is already having the desired effect of getting picked up in the local media as the examples here, here and here demonstrate.  Yet, I can't help but to want to know more.