PARSIPPANY

— In New Jersey, traffic is a grudging companion to many motorists.

But this past summer, the Route 80 construction zone in Morris County was more than an annoyance. It was an environment where crashes nearly tripled, according to data obtained by NJ Advance Media. In July alone, in the construction area of this major national east-west highway there were more than 110 crashes, which averages out to about three a day. Before construction, the area averaged about one crash a day, the data shows.

ROUTE 80 CONSTRUCTION

•

Commissioner: Fixing transportation trust fund means bringing the public on board

•

Commuters: Route 80, Route 287 construction 'a traffic nightmare'

•

Route 80 express lanes to return to final configuration this week

Part of the cause for such a high crash rate are barriers that separated some of the fast-moving highway traffic into a single lane, creating what traffic experts call a "cattle chute," said state transportation Commissioner Jamie Fox. That chute, Fox said, was the longest ever used for a New Jersey road project.

Transportation officials now say that was a mistake, that it may have caused additional crashes. But they also say it was a miscalculation they couldn't have seen coming.

"In this case, it did not work," Fox said. "We have to admit when you have 200 crashes over a period of two months, which is at least double of what it has been in other projects when this approach has been used, that a cookie-cutter approach to every project does not work."

'Is someone trying to torture us?'

NJ Advance Media examined State Police crash data from when construction began across all 10 lanes of the highway in August 2012 through this August, and compared it with the 3½ years before those projects began. The data show that the number of crashes increased by more than 25 percent during the period that construction took place.

In July, when the cattle chute was in place, the percent of crashes increased by 182 percent compared to the average number of crashes before the project started, according to the state data.

Of July's 110 crashes, 89 involved injuries — more than quadruple the number of crashes with injuries compared to the same time last year. None of them were fatal.

Cathleen Lewis, AAA's regional director of public affairs and government relations, said many of these crashes weren't single- or two-vehicle crashes, but "quick pile-ups" involving a number of vehicles due in part to the design of the roadway and driver inattention.

The dangerous conditions have not gone without notice among motorists. Marian Harrison, a commuter, said she's frequently encountered lines of vehicles in a standstill on Route 80.

"I would like to know who thought it was a good idea to do construction on Route 280 at the same time," Harrison said of work on the highway that feeds into Route 80 in the construction area. "The signage is so poor you have to wonder if someone is trying to torture us."

Jackie Krueger, another commuter, said the construction projects were "nothing short of a disaster" and "poorly planned."

One way to keep a lane open

The $90 million project on Route 80 by Union Paving and Construction begun in August 2012 included repaving all 10 lanes of the highway along a four-mile stretch in Parsippany, between the Route 202/Littleton Road exit to the Beverwyck Road interchange. New fiber-optic cables were also installed and guide rails repaired on two ramp overpasses.

It's an enormous project that Lewis says underscores the larger issues at play in the Garden State — specifically, the lack of money available in the state's transportation trust fund.

"The big problem is that without the right amount of money in the transportation trust fund we're not doing routine maintenance in the same way," she said. "What that causes is for us to do massive infrastructure projects because we're not maintaining the roads as we should.”

In addition to managing how traffic from Routes 280 and 287 would merge into the construction zone, traffic engineers also had to determine how 159,000 vehicles would make their way through the construction area each day. Because of that amount of traffic, at least one express lane had to remain open on both sides of the road at all times, transportation officials said.

The cattle chute was one way to keep a lane of traffic open.

'A perfect storm'

DOT communications director Stephen Schapiro said the cattle chute was previously used in Gloucester and Camden counties on Route 295 in both the north and southbound lanes between 2010 and 2012, and that there was a cattle chute in effect recently on that highway near Route 168.

Cattle chutes were also used on the Pulaski Skyway Contract 2 project rehabilitating the upper and lower level of Route 139 and over the summer on the Direct Connection project on Route 76 near Market Street, Schapiro said.

However, at 2.7-miles long, it turned out that the chute on Route 80 was the longest one the DOT had ever created, Fox said. It also carried a larger volume of traffic than those smaller chutes. It wasn’t until after the crashes began to occur, he said, that the DOT found out that the length of the chute “ makes a big difference and shut it down in August.

"Between the two roads (Route 80 and Route 287), there's a $120 million project, there's a lot of convergence of roads," Fox said. "You generally have increased accidents where you have construction projects because of a change in driver habits and lane shifts. In this case, the cattle chute created a perfect storm.”

Fox stopped short of calling the design a failure, saying instead the DOT learned a lot from the flawed design such as the limitations of the cattle chute.

"There’s nothing wrong with us saying that we could have done better,” he said.

Should state officials have known better?

Andy Kaplan, senior transportation safety engineer with Rutgers Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation, said large projects are complex. Engineers must design projects that are safe, and design them quickly.



"Part of what that engineer is supposed to do is predict the future," he said. "You're not necessarily able to account for everything fully. "

Kris Kolluri, state transportation commissioner from 2006 to 2008, and Anthony Attanasio, a former assistant transportation commissioner, said massive road projects such as the Route 80 construction present a complex balancing act.

“You don’t want to rush a job to minimize inconvenience,” Attanasio said.

Kolluri, who currently serves as CEO of Rowan University and Rutgers-Camden, said, in his experience, every accommodation is made by the DOT to ensure safety.

"Having been in that position, nobody from the project said ‘let’s put a 2.7-mile cattle chute in,' if it’s not necessary,” he said. “This is not a decision that’s made lightly."

End is in sight

Going forward, DOT Chief of Staff Joseph said, the agency will take into account the length of the cattle chute, as well as how factors such volume and speed of traffic may affect safety conditions.

This past August, the cattle chute was removed two weeks ahead of schedule, Schapiro said. Since its removal, things have improved "tremendously," Fox said.

Sovereign immunity, which bars civil litigation against the state, and the contractual terms between the DOT and its contractor would likely insulate the department from potential litigation, transportation officials have said.

Final paving will likely be done in the spring, Schapiro said, and work on Route 287 is expected to end in late 2015.

Graphics by NJ Advance Media Reporter Stephen Stirling.

Route 80, Route 287 crash gallery 2012-2014 15 Gallery: Route 80, Route 287 crash gallery 2012-2014

Justin Zaremba may be reached at jzaremba@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinZarembaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

