State Highway Access Code
PlanSmart NJ President Dianne Brake was invited to be a member of an Advisory Group to a NJ Department of Transportation project that was reassessing the State’s Highway Access Management Code – the third time since the Code was enacted as law in 1990 that she has served in this capacity. Although each time improvements to the Code are made, there is still more needed to transform NJDOT’s approach to congestion, land use and regulations – Code requirements still impede growth in identified growth areas.
This time, much of the consulting work was spent on how the Access Code affects communities that have a main street that is also a state highway. Consultants developed an effective scoring system to identify these special places.
As valuable as that work was, there was little change to the parts of the Code that have already been identified as problems in downtowns that are centered on state highways. PlanSmart NJ continued to advocate that the Code should be based on statewide targets for reducing auto-dependency and promoting center-based development around a transit plan. PlanSmart NJ advocated that NJDOT work with NJ Transit to select priority transit corridors and develop a long-range master plan that identifies these corridors and how they will be serviced throughout the state with an intra-regional system and aggressive feeder service. This approach could turn local land use battles against density into arguments for new transit capacity.