Somerset County Planning Division

"CREATING QUALITY COMMUNITIES TOGETHER"

Robert P. Bzik, AICP/PP
Director of Planning
Anthony V. McCracken, Sr., AICP/PP
 Assistant Director

20 Grove Street
P.O. Box 3000
Somerville, NJ 08876

REGIONAL CAPITAL INVESTMENT STRATEGY

What are the Region’s Transportation Priorities?

In order to balance the many competing regional transportation priorities, with the long-term goal of maintaining a robust and promising future for northern New Jersey, the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA) developed a Regional Capital Investment Strategy (RCIS) in 2005. RCIS provides a guiding vision for the way transportation funds should be invested in the region. It was developed by the NJTPA after analyzing several future investment scenarios that balanced anticipated revenue streams and the tradeoffs involving in supporting smart growth, preserving existing infrastructure, enhancing goods movement, or expanding public transit or highways. After carefully considering the investment scenarios and obtaining input from staff and an advisory committee of planning stakeholders, the NJTPA Board of Trustees settled on the following eight (8) broad transportation investment principles:

Help the Region Grow Wisely: Transportation investments should encourage economic growth while protecting the environment and minimizing sprawl in accordance with the New Jersey State Development and Redevelopment Plan

Make Travel Safer: Improving the safety and security of the transportation system should be explicitly incorporated into the planning, design and implementation process for all investments.

Fix it First: The existing transportation system requires large expenditures for maintenance, preservation and repair, and its stewardship of region’s infrastructure should be the highest priority.

Expand Public Transit: Investing to improve the region’s extensive bus and rail network should be a high priority, including strategic expansions to serve new markets such as reactivization of the West Trenton Line in Somerset and Mercer Counties.

Improve Roads but Add Few: Road investments should focus on making the existing system safer and work better, and road expansions should be limited (averaging 2.5 percent or less of the total funding) and integrated with land use.

Move Freight More Efficiently: Investments should be made to improve the efficiency of goods movement and promote intermodal options where possible, including rail and waterborne freight movement, because of its importance to the region’s economy.

Manage Incidents and Apply Transportation and Technology: Investments should be made to improve information flow within and among operating agencies, operational coordination and other new technology advances that can make the transportation system work smarter and more efficiently.

Support Walking and Bicycling: All transportation projects should promote walking and bicycling wherever possible, and investments should be targeted to areas with existing, growing and the strong potential for walking and bicycle travel.

Implementation

Implementation of the above Regional Capital Investment Strategy principles allows the NJTPA to develop a fiscally constrained list of projects, programs, studies and new initiatives that addresses a broad range of mobility needs and all aspects of the region’s transportation network. Examples include: rehabilitation or replacement of hundreds of structurally-deficient bridges, repaving or rehabilitation of ten of thousands of lane miles of state and county roads, eliminating localized traffic bottlenecks (renovating intersections or adding turning lanes) and improving the efficiency of the road network, a limited number of potential road expansions and new initiatives ranging from pedestrian access to park-and-ride lots to new rail stations. A complete picture of all the projects and initiatives recommended in NJTPA’s Access and Mobility 2030 Plan can be found in the Project index of the Plan at www.njtpa.org.

What are the Funding Implications?

The NJTPA will use the Regional Capital Investment Strategy to establish investment targets for the long term, recognizing funding for the various categories may vary from year-to year, which translates into the following guidelines:
 

• Maintain or modestly increase maintenance and preservation which now averages 60 percent of funding
• Maintain current total allocation at around 21 percent of spending for enhancing and expanding public transportation
• Maintain the 10 percent of spending for enhancing existing roadways
• Limit expanding roadway capacity (new rods and major lane widening) to slightly below 2.5 percent
• Maintain or increase slightly the allocations for incident/emergency management and intelligent transportation systems
• Increase spending from about 1 percent to 1.25 percent for walking and biking projects
• Modestly increase the current allocation dedicated to freight improvements from 0.8 percent to 1.0 percent
• Continue providing 0.5 percent of funds for demand management including funding for Transportation Management Associates like Ridewise of Raritan Valley
• Increase allocations for direct safety improvements from 2 percent to 2.25 percent

Source: NJTPA Access and Mobility 2030. Additional information can be obtained by contacting the NJTPA at www.njtpa.org