Record travel expected this 4th of July in NJ

The AAA auto club is expecting 47 million people to travel this July 4 holiday nationwide, and 1.3 million of them here in New Jersey.

Tracy Noble of AAA/Mid-Atlantic says it's a travel increase of 3.2 percent of last year's Independence Day in Jersey.

"We have got 1.1 million New Jersey residents driving to their destinations. That is 84 percent of those traveling," she said.

Nationwide, the AAA numbers show that 5.5 million more people will travel for the Fourth versus Memorial Day this year.

Air travel is going to be busy as well.

"We have almost 109,000 New Jersey residents flying to their destination. And that is actually an increase of 7.1 percent," she said.

And these record travel numbers on the road come despite higher gas prices, right now at an average of $2.88 a gallon in New Jersey.

"It is a little bit of a challenge when the holiday falls on a Wednesday. But what we believe we are going to see is people leaving work early, Tuesday afternoon, they have the holiday off on Wednesday, and then they are going to be taking off the Thursday and Friday, and extending that into the weekend."

Joe Cutter is the afternoon news anchor at New Jersey 101.5