Location
North Bergen, NJ
Client
New Jersey Department of Transportation
Services
Transportation Engineering
Traffic Monitoring
Public Outreach
Transportation Management
NJ Route 495 Peer Review
The New Jersey Department of Transportation’s (NJDOT) is rehabilitating the NJ Route 495 viaduct in North Bergen, at the interchange with U.S. Route 1/9. This has resulted in many long-term lane closures and detours dictated by the project’s transportation management plan. Greenman Pederson, Inc., the plan’s author, retained Sam Schwartz Engineering, DPC (Sam Schwartz) to prepare a peer review of it and to perform other traffic engineering and public outreach tasks.
As part of its review, Sam Schwartz performed independent traffic monitoring based on field visits, observations from a traffic camera, and Google Maps API travel time data. The team wrote scripts in Python to scrape this data and track travel times along 17 routes through the area. Four critical routes to and from the heavily-trafficked Lincoln Tunnel were selected to compare pre-construction travel times to current travel times. Sam Schwartz turned this data into easy-to-understand tables and graphics, which were used in public information sessions.