This page provides a quick look at how the NJTPA is supporting Smart Growth in our region. Additional details will be added in the future.
Regional Planning
Long Range Plan
The NJTPA's long range plan,
Access & Mobility 2030, is built around a Regional Capital Investment Strategy (RCIS) that sets out principles and guidelines for future investments. The RCIS, developed in 2004 and 2005, attempts to deal with the rising demand for travel over the next 25 years through a balanced, realistic approach to regional spending. One key strategy is a call for investments that promote Smart Growth. It states:
Help the Region Grow Wisely: Investments in the region’s transportation system should support smart, sustainable growth. That means following the guidelines set out by the state to encourage development and redevelopment in cities, planned growth areas, regional centers, brownfields, grayfields and other places with existing infrastructure. Investments in other areas must be scrutinized carefully to ensure that they are justified and that they do not encourage sprawl.
A number of investment guidelines are presented that are intended to implement this broad principle. Among other approaches, they urge: investment in cities, brownfields and designated growth areas; scrutinizing investments to minimize spawl-inducing impacts; encouraging compact, mixed-used development close to transit; promoting context sensitive development and traffic calming; encouraging fewer auto trips in conjunction with Transportation Management Association programs; and insuring the benefits and burdens of investments are distributed equitably throughout the region.
Technical Studies
The NJTPA funds a variety of planning efforts by its member "subregions" –13 counties and two cities – through the Subregional Study program. Much of this work directly promotes Smart Growth strategies such as intermodalism, bicycle/pedestrian travel, transit-oriented development, steering and controlling growth, etc. Past, current and upcoming Subregional studies are described on the Subregion page.
Brownfields Economic Redevelopment Study
On January 13, 2003, the NJTPA released the final report of a three-year study, undertaken in partnership with the New Jersey Institute of Technology, exploring the opportunities for freight-related redevelopment of brownfield sites in and around the port district. Such redevelopment would help avert the current practice of constructing huge warehouses and distribution centers on former farmland and other "greenfield" sites such as around Exit 8A of the Turnpike. In doing so it would fulfill the Smart Growth goals of preserving open space, bringing brownfields back to productive use, revitalizing urban areas, reducing the need for long distance trucking of goods and creating new jobs in proximity to urban populations with significant unemployment. For more on the report and related efforts, click here.
The NJTPA will continue to work with NJIT in exploring opportunities for freight related brownfields reuse and following up on the recommendations in the study. Specific activities will include presentations and briefings on the study to key public agencies and private groups, a planned conference on the study at NJIT in the spring, revised NJTPA policies to give greater funding priority to projects that benefit brownfields, continued research in identifying redevelopment opportunities in and around the port district and efforts to insure that brownfields redevelopment is considered in decisions about the Portway project.
Systems Planning, Modeling and Data
North Jersey Strategy Evaluation
The NJTPA's North Jersey Strategy Evaluation underpinned the identification of Regional Transportation Plan priorities for accessibility and mobility investments. The analysis fully integrated Smart Growth planning principles:
- The study methodology was consistent with the State Development and Redevelopment Plan planning areas. Performance goals were established by area type - goals for accessibility were set higher in denser urban and suburban areas.
- Performance measures used the concept of accessibility - different from mobility - to shift focus from freely flowing highways toward providing convenient and reliable access to jobs, schools, shopping and other destinations. Smart Growth promotes accessibility.
- Sustainability is a key aspect of the system's performance. All strategies were examined in terms of the sustainability dimension as well as other performance measures.
- Pedestrian/bicycle mobility and transit mobility, both important aspects of Smart Growth, were included in the analysis.
- The study methodology favors investment in designated State Plan centers, the areas targeted for growth and redevelopment under a Smart Growth approach.
- Smart Growth/growth management, transit, travel demand management, pedestrian, bicycle, operational and intelligent transportation system strategies were all explicitly analyzed and advanced into the Regional Transportation Plan, calling for further project-level planning and development. Such strategies serve a Smart Growth agenda.
Other Work
Current and future Smart Growth-related work will revolve around:
- Development of new new NJTPA prioritization mechanisms, including criteria and scoring for identifying needs, selecting strategies, and ranking projects for funding that would help channel infrastructure investments to areas where growth is encouraged.
- Continued performance evaluation of transportation issues related to environmental, growth management, economic and quality-of-life goals to find potential Smart Growth investments.
- Demographic forecasting, Geographic Information Systems, regional modeling, and other data efforts will continue to incorporate information about development, land use, environmental issues, and economic conditions into transportation analysis.
Capital Programming
Local Lead Program
The Local Lead Program, which had been underway since 1996, allows the subregions to apply directly for federal funding to advance transportation projects through final design, right-of-way, and/or construction. This program is a cooperative effort between the NJTPA and NJDOT. NJTPA Central Staff is responsible for soliciting and screening applications with NJDOT, prioritizing and ranking projects eligible for the TIP, coordinating with the subregions, and tracking the status of projects.
System preservation/Smart Growth -- the "fix it first" philosophy- - is reflected in the criteria that are used to prioritize and select projects. Since the inception of the Local Lead Program, over $123 million has funded 106 projects of which all have been system preservation/Smart Growth projects.
NJTPA Project Prioritization Criteria
Federal regulations require that the annual $2 billion Transportation Improvement Program include a prioritized list of projects. The NJTPA uses a variety of criteria to create a prioritized list of projects for the Transportation Improvment Program. The criteria are based on performance standards and a scoring system that ranks projects according to the degree to which projects satisfy the NJTPA's six goals as stated in the Regional Transportation Plan. Three of the six goals place a clear emphasis on Smart Growth. They are: (1) protecting the environment by decreasing vehicle miles traveled; (2) maintaining system preservation; and (3) coordinating land use with transportation improvements. Also During 2002, the NJTPA modified its project prioritization criteria to better reflect the revised State Development and Redevelopment Plan (SDRP) regarding designated centers.