NJDOT is finally fixing Route 55. Just not the part that ends too soon.

I've written more than once about Route 55 being a promise New Jersey never quite kept, an expressway that was supposed to run all the way to the Parkway and instead just stops, dumping traffic onto Route 47 more than 20 miles short of where it was always meant to go.

This week brought a different kind of Route 55 news. Not about finishing it. About making the part that already exists safer.

What actually happened this summer

On July 5, two 22-year-old women, including a social media influencer, were killed in a crash on Route 55 in Gloucester County. Just days later, a 24-year-old man died when his truck collided head-on with a tractor-trailer on the same highway, also in Gloucester County.

Those two crashes, in the same short stretch of road within days of each other, got Trenton's attention in a way that years of steady, grinding statistics apparently hadn't.

The response, on paper

Assemblyman Bill Moen pushed NJDOT for answers, and this week he shared a letter from the department's chief of staff outlining what the agency's Division of Traffic Engineering and Bureau of Safety Improvement Programs actually found.

The plan covers four things:

• Variable message signs are already up along Route 55, warning drivers to use caution
• New "Wrong Way" signage is being produced for problem interchanges and median locations, specifically aimed at drivers accessing Route 55 wrong-way between Exits 45 and 56
• An active project is clearing trees from the clear zones near problem interchanges
• Guiderail is planned at multiple locations, meant to keep vehicles from leaving the roadway and reduce how severe a crash becomes if one happens anyway

"This is a positive step forward in addressing this issue," Moen wrote.

SEE ALSO: Somerset Freeway, Route 55, Route 60 — the roads NJ promised and quietly abandoned

Route 55 south at Route 40

Why I'm not ready to call this solved

I believe him that it's a step. I'm not convinced it's enough.

I've already reported that between 2003 and 2015, 23 people died along just a 23-mile stretch of Route 47 below where Route 55 currently ends. Three more died there in 2025 alone. Those numbers didn't come from one bad week. They came from two decades of funneling highway-speed traffic onto a local road that was never built to carry it.

Signage and guiderail address real, specific hazards, wrong-way driving and vehicles leaving the road are genuinely dangerous, and I'm glad NJDOT is finally doing something about both. But it doesn't touch the underlying reason Route 47 carries the volume it does in the first place: Route 55 stops more than 20 miles short of where it was supposed to end.

I still believe what I wrote back in June. I love the Pinelands, and I think the 1979 Pinelands Protection Act did far more good than harm for this state. I'm not arguing we should have paved through it. But there's a difference between "we chose not to finish this highway" and "we've spent decades not seriously discussing what that choice actually costs."

This week's letter is proof that pressure gets a response. Two young women and a young man are gone, and it still took their deaths, on top of everything already known about that road, to produce four bullet points and a letter. I hope it's the start of something bigger, not the end of the conversation.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 show host ­­Eric Johnson only.