67 Stunning photos of NJ’s roads, bridges falling apart

If a picture's worth 1,000 words, 1,000 pictures should be worth a million.

That math's far simpler than the political and financial calculations needed to get New Jersey's Transportation Trust Fund back into shape before it runs out of money in July. As legislators consider a wildly unpopular gas tax proposal, roads and bridges continue to crumble.

That decaying infrastructure has been meticulously documented in about 1,000 photos by a firm working with the N.J. Alliance for Action, which this week unveiled its On the Road NJ site, showing bridges, streets and other bits of the road underneath us all falling apart.

"We did a couple of bridge videos a year or two ago," said Phil Beachem, president of the alliance. "One of the things we learned about the bridge video was it went viral. The idea we’ve been kicking around — 'How do you explain to people the situation in terms of what the roads are always like?'"

The problem, he said, is when we're driving over streets and bridges, we're looking ahead — not at what's happening under our vehicles. And so the extent of the damage is usually hidden from drivers during typical travel.

"There were several images that showed some pretty badly deteriorating bridges — they were pretty shocking to me," he said. "People, for instance, when people drive down a county road, are not always aware that they're going over 10 or 15 small bridges underneath that road. You might have a stream under you, or a substructure that was built 50 or 60 years ago."

He cited the decay of a section of concrete under Route 35 in Wall, above a bike path. It collapsed late one night.

"Thank God it happened when there weren't many people there," he said. "During the day, that bike path is packed with people. And the bridge itself still needs to be addressed."

While some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature are backing the idea of a gas tax, they've come under criticism from Republicans including Chris Christie. But the governor, on a recent episode of New Jersey 101.5's Ask the Governor, said he wouldn't entirely rule a gas tax increase out if other taxes were decreased to offset it.

Beachem, for his part, said the state should be looking at a number of revenue sources — for instance, billboards along the New Jersey Turnpike (most seen from the highway are actually on private land). But one way or another, he said, New Jersey's streets and bridges need to be repaired before they disappear from underfoot.