Julio Cortez/AP Photo
Vehicles line up at a tollboth on the northbound New Jersey Turnpike, April 2019
As the climate crisis continues to worsen around the world, Democrats have finally resolved to do something about it with the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act. But this alone will not reconcile political tensions that will be central to our politics in the years ahead. One such example is coming into focus in Trenton, where a proposed extension of the New Jersey Turnpike has turned into an ongoing saga between the state government and, in a sense, the rest of the world.
The New Jersey Turnpike extension project, which predates the Inflation Reduction Act and Build Back Better, will cost $4.7 billion if ultimately approved and would take “10 to 15 years” to complete. Essentially, the project would widen and add lanes in a key stretch between Newark Airport and the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, which leads to downtown Manhattan. Aging infrastructure, such as the two-lane Newark Bay Bridge, would be replaced with a new four-lane structure. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and the plan’s proponents claim that the multibillion-dollar project will alleviate notoriously heavy congestion and traffic on this stretch of the turnpike.
This is the kind of improvement that was touted by President Biden in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. But it reveals a real failing of that legislation: Despite paying lip service to climate-resilient projects, it leaves up to the states what will be built. It’s likely that many of those projects will look like the New Jersey Turnpike widening project, which has the capacity to increase greenhouse gas emissions. And this is happening in a heavily Democratic state, with the avid support of a key Democratic constituency: labor unions.
There are reasons to be skeptical about the turnpike project’s ability to forestall heavy traffic. Some cite the concept of “induced demand,” defined by Bloomberg’s Benjamin Schneider. “When you provide more of something,” explained Schneider, “or provide it for a cheaper price, people are more likely to use it.”
In this case, opponents of the extension project say that the added lanes will only invite more drivers onto the highway rather than ease traffic. More traffic of course means more carbon emissions and pollution, the latter of which will most affect various communities of color that this section of the turnpike runs through and along.
While campaigning for governor in 2017 and during his time in office, Murphy made promises for mandating 50 percent clean energy throughout New Jersey by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. (Some scientists have called these targets insufficient.) But those promises, which will be aided by the federal support available in the Inflation Reduction Act, mean little if the highway-dependent state continues to build fossil fuel infrastructure. Carbon emissions are actually up 19 percent in New Jersey since Murphy took office, and are projected to rise by as much as 38 percent if several proposed projects, including the turnpike extension plan, are approved. Murphy has been noticeably silent about this, as well as the climate crisis as a whole, in recent months.
There are reasons to be skeptical about the turnpike project’s ability to forestall heavy traffic.
This controversy takes place in a larger context of chaos and disorder related to aging infrastructure that mars the entire New Jersey–New York commuter scene. NJ Transit train service is consistently ranked the worst in the nation, and many of the bridges and tunnels in the area are in bad shape. Experts warn that the collapse of any of the tunnels that lie below the Hudson River would lead to dire, unprecedented consequences that could not be quickly overcome by alternative infrastructure and transportation. But fixing the old rail tunnels and building new ones, a project known as Gateway that the Biden administration finally approved last May after a three-decade fight, does not translate into widening the turnpike and inviting more noxious auto traffic. If anything, it should lead to the opposite.
The dilemma is deepened by the fact that scientists warn that any path forward for transportation based primarily on cars and driving, even ones that involve electric vehicles, could have a minimal effect on curbing carbon emissions, if people drive at the same rate they do today.
Opponents of the plan include the mayor of Jersey City, the Newark Star-Ledger editorial board, the city councils of Hoboken and Jersey City, hundreds of state environmental groups, and many local residents and activists.
Environmental groups banded together in May to file a protest petition to the New Jersey Department of Transportation as well as the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, arguing that the plan was an affront to climate and environmental justice. The groups argued that Murphy and state agencies would be much better off investing in public transportation, bike lanes, walkways, and, when necessary, repair projects rather than expansion. (This, by the way, is similar to the federal Department of Transportation’s advice to states to use infrastructure bill funding earmarked for highways to “fix it first.”) The petition was denied by the Turnpike Authority in late July.
Murphy has not wavered from supporting the project, despite the opposition. Instead, he has tried to deflect concerns. “There’s not one magic wand here in terms of where the future will take us,” the governor said on August 16. “But the combination of electric vehicles, green buses, railcars, all of which are working safely and on time, that makes you a lot cleaner, better environmental New Jersey.”
Murphy is joined in this support, fittingly, by organized labor. Despite his Wall Street background, Murphy has enjoyed trade union support since his initial gubernatorial run in 2017, and has raised millions of dollars from them. It is indeed several of New Jersey’s construction unions that are most enthusiastic about this project; they vouch for the union jobs it will create and claim that environmental concerns are misguided.
“Unfortunately, we live in the real world,” said the Engineers Labor-Employer Cooperative, dismissing global climate as well as local environmental concerns. “And over 100,000 vehicles travel through the Holland Tunnel daily. Goods, services, employees, and tourists all use this vital economic highway. Road expansion will reduce congestion and pollution from vehicles idling as well as grow both the local and regional economies.”
Labor, enticed by prevailing-wage provisions, strongly supported the federal climate bill, which they see as powering new green industries that they can organize. But older unions like the construction trades are always going to look out for their members, even at the expense of a warming planet. A state defined by suburban sprawl will always be difficult to decarbonize, but especially if nominal champions refuse to make difficult choices.
It has not yet dawned on many of us—for understandable reasons—just how central the climate crisis has become to all aspects of our lives, and how this centrality is only going to deepen. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act is a hint that there has been a zeitgeist shift, as environmentalist Bill McKibben put it. But situations like the New Jersey Turnpike extension controversy remind us that there is still a lot of work to be done.
