Thirteen new Complete Streets policies in New Jersey, including 10 in the NJTPA region, were ranked in Best Complete Streets Policies Report 2025, a new report from Smart Growth America.
The 13 new policies in New Jersey were mostly municipal, with one county and the state also included:
- Asbury Park, #9
- Red Bank, #10
- Florence, #13
- Oakland, #13
- Fort Lee, #19
- Cranford, #21
- East Windsor, #22
- Morris County, #23
- New Jersey, #25
- Little Silver, #29
- Teaneck, #30
- Readington, #32
- Bernardsville, #40
(Florence and East Windsor are not located within the NJTPA’s 13-county region while New Jersey is a statewide policy).
The report presents new policies that have been adopted between 2023 and 2024 and scores them based on 10 elements. It highlights those with the highest scores and analyzes general trends and observational data from its policy review.
More than 1,700 Complete Streets policies have been adopted across the United States but the number has slowed in recent years. There were 27 policies adopted in 2024, compared with 16 in 2023 and 18 in 2022 – far less than the recent highs of 73 adopted as recently as 2019 and 114 in 2018.
While communities from coast to coast have adopted a Complete Streets policy in the past two years, Smart Growth America described the distribution across the U.S. as “uneven, revealing both promising clusters of new policies and troubling gaps.”
New Jersey accounted for 13 of the 43 new policies, about 30 percent, that have been adopted between 2023 and 2024. No new policies were adopted in western states beyond Washington and California.
Just about three-quarters of new policies adopted were by municipalities, with the remainder found among Metropolitan Planning Organizations (14 percent), States (7 percent), and Counties (4.7 percent).
Overall, new policies continue to score higher than policies adopted in previous years, according to the report. The average Complete Streets policy score in the latest report is 52 out of 100 points. That’s an improvement over the 2023 report, which had an average of 45 Points, which was an increase from 39 points in 2018.
The average score for the top 10 policies in this report is 79 points out of 100—a decrease from 89 points in 2023, but still higher than the 72-point average in 2018. Policies receive inconsistent marks on elements specifically related to prioritizing underinvested communities and implementation (Elements #2, #9, and #10 in the Complete Streets Policy Framework), according to the report.