June 2024
Posted: 6/27/2024 1:12:11 PM
Sales of electric vehicles (EV) continued to grow in the second half of 2023, though not quite as strongly as the exceptional growth of the first half.
Zenon Tech-Czarny, Principal Planner, Environmental Planning, provided a regional electric vehicle update to the Joint Project Prioritization and Planning and Economic Development Committee during its June 17 meeting.
There was a 24-percent increase in EV registrations in the last six months of 2023 compared with a 35-percent jump in the prior six months, but the difference only came down to about 2,000 vehicles overall. There were 23,865 new vehicles registered in the most recent period versus 25,824 in the previous six-month period. “Growth is still fairly strong, but it needs to be much more to reach the statewide goal of 330,000 by 2025,” Tech-Czarny said.
Total registrations are rising overall but they’re also rising in every county in the NJTPA region and in relationship to other vehicles, Tech-Czarny said. Somerset County leads in EV percentage relative to total vehicles at almost 4 percent, followed by Bergen and Middlesex counties. Bergen and Essex counties have the highest numbers of EVs and saw the most gains. The EV Index, which accounts for both the number and percentage of EVs, showed high adoption rates in municipalities like Edison and South Brunswick.
The significant surge in EV adoption is thanks in part to New Jersey’s Charge Up program and the introduction of the Tesla Model Y, which both occurred in 2020. The Model Y is the most popular EV in New Jersey with more than 31,000 in the NJTPA’s 13-county region. Overall, Tesla makes up 66,529 vehicles out of the more than 122,000 EVs in the region.
Tech-Czarny said the NJTPA collects and analyzes EV data, incorporates EV data into greenhouse gas emissions inventories, and develops strategy documents to promote EV adoption. EVs are also key to part of the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality and Carbon Reduction Programs, among others. The approach is cyclical, where data informs strategy, leading to implementation, which in turn generates new data.
More information on EVs is available at the NJTPA's EV Resources Hub at NJTPA.org/EV including funding opportunities for EV infrastructure through Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) programs.
A recording of the Joint meeting, including the EV data presentation, can be accessed here.
Posted: 6/20/2024 3:17:28 PM
The explosion of e-commerce since the pandemic makes it easy for consumers to order almost anything at any time but the flip side is that it’s created challenges for towns and cities overrun with delivery trucks.
The NJTPA’s Freight Initiatives Committee hosted a panel discussion during its June 17 meeting, featuring three planners in the region to provide their perspectives on truck routing and curb management.
“If you are going to guarantee delivery of something within an hour, you can’t have it on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel to be delivered into Manhattan," said Alison Conway, associate professor of civil engineering at The City College of New York’s Grove School of Engineering “So that means we have to have distribution facilities in the heart of the city, which would have been unheard of 10 or 15 years ago,” she said. That’s led to the emergence of combined retail distribution models, where retail stores have become delivery points, as well as “dark stores,” which are retail stores that don’t provide a retail function but serve as small-scale distribution facilities fulfilling on-demand, even 15-minute deliveries, mainly via e-bike.
The City Council recently approved the first major rezoning in New York City since the early 1970s. The changes have the potential to enable some innovative distribution, Conway said, such as the allowing the development of micro distribution facilities in commercial districts zoned primarily for retail, and and flexible use of private parking garages, which have become underutilized in many cities with the shift to work from home.
The growing use of E-bikes, including E-cargo bikes, for deliveries is an area where “the industry is ahead of regulation so there’s still more work needed to figure out exactly where we define the vehicle as a bicycle and a motor vehicle,” Conway said. “We need to figure out how to set uniform regulations for these things."
Freight and Complete Streets
Kristen Scudder, Freight Program Manager for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) , which covers nine counties in the Philadelphia region, including parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, discussed the Philadelphia Truck Network and Complete Streets Integration Guidebook. It was developed in conjunction with Philadelphia but many elements are applicable around the region and beyond.
"Freight considerations are not only about the efficiency and effectiveness of goods movement, they’re really more about the safety and quality of life of other road users and of members of our community,” Scudder said."We have clear networks for other modes on our streets” -- cars, bikes, transit – but what’s mostly lacking is a truck network. Defining a truck network can help communities better understand where trucks are moving and be used across all transportation planning efforts, she added.
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Kevin Force, Supervising Planner at the Hudson County Division of Planning served as program manager for the Hudson County Truck Routes Assessment, funded through the NJTPA’s Subregional Studies Program. The assessment offered a variety of recommendations, organized around the needs of the commercial, residential, and industrial sectors to address issues like delivery trucks using local streets as cut-throughs, the need for loading zones, and trucks operating in restricted areas.
In commercial or mixed-use districts, Force said, designated curbed loading zones at peak delivery times could serve as parking at other times and different pricing levels could encourage the turnover of those spaces. In residential areas, consolidated deliveries and the use of e-cargo bikes could be encouraged. Industrial areas are about accommodating large trucks while reducing emissions and noise and the study found a need for truck parking and rest stops.
A recording of the FIC meeting can be accessed here.
Posted: 6/18/2024 11:14:52 AM
A wealth of travel safety data can now be accessed through a web dashboard thanks to the New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes Center. The organization, launched 13 years ago, is compiling and consolidating data from various sources in a publicly accessible website for use by safety planners and practitioners, among others.
“Our goal really is to reimagine how data—particularly traffic safety data—are collected, integrated, analyzed and shared to support safe transport in New Jersey,” said Allison E. Curry, who is director of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She spoke about the dashboard at the June 10 meeting of the NJTPA’s Regional Transportation Advisory Committee.
The dashboard draws upon a data warehouse built by the New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes Center, which includes various kinds of safety data from 2004 through 2020, including data on crashes, driver licensing, EMS activity, trauma center registrations and discharges, and more. She said integrating all the data is a “laborious process.”. It includes 125 million records on 24,000 individuals who are tracked over time.
She said consolidating the data serves a vital purpose since the official state crash reports miss one-third of injuries because they don’t capture data from hospitals. Integrating this and other data sources, the Center presents a more complete picture of traffic safety across the state.
The database includes geocoded data on where people involved in crashes live and where the crashes occurred. Algorithms analyzing last names cross-referenced with demographic information from the Census help identify the race and ethnicity of the people, which is not available on crash reports or in licensing files. This enhances the ability to add equity considerations in targeting safety campaigns and improvements.
She offered the example of using data to identify where crashes of cars without child restraint systems occurred, based on records of crashes causing injuries to children. The data patterns can be used to target communities with programs to improve use of the restraints. A similar analysis can be used, she said, to guide interventions to promote seatbelt use.
The dashboard is available at njsho.chop.edu and includes 10 webpages focusing on various aspects of traffic safety. The data can be shown for individual counties and allows comparisons among counties. Curry said the Center is planning to host trainings for people interested in using the dashboard. She said partners in the effort include the state Division of Highway Traffic Safety, New Jersey Department of Transportation, New Jersey Department of Health, the state Office of Information Technology and the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. A video of Curry’s presentation is here.