Study: NJ has second worst roads in the nation

Even if you haven’t had the pleasure of blowing out a tire or busting an axel in half on a New Jersey pothole, you may still be less than in love with the quality of our roads.

I’ve seen worse stretches of road in places like Rhode Island when I drove my son to look at a university there. And I’ve seen better, well-maintained roads in states like Florida. That’s all anecdotal, from just the roads I’ve personally been on. We only know what we know.

Now comes a study that confirms I wasn’t crazy. A cash-for-cars service called Junk Car Medics did a study analyzing a decade’s worth of road condition data. They considered miles of roads deemed “unacceptable” from info provided by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for the years 2012 to 2022.

Rhode Island was the worst state in the nation for road conditions. Their average percentage of roads labeled unacceptable was a whopping 48%.

But look who came in right behind in second place. New Jersey’s roads are so bad we scored 45.69% of our roads being unacceptable. Or, put it this unflattering way. Of 3,868 total miles of road in the Garden State, 1,767 were bad.

This all has financial consequences. For example, AAA has said that a Jersey driver will pay, on average, about $600 to repair the damage inflicted on their vehicle due to running over a pothole.

Thank God they’re raising our gas tax nearly 3 cents a gallon again next month to keep these roads in tip-top shape, huh? That’s working out!

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

Report a correction 👈