The New Jersey Turnpike vs. Sam

Why is the New Jersey Turnpike so famously ugly? Legend says the authority that built it in less than two years from 1949 to 1951 had originally budgeted for landscaping. But on second thought, they decided, 80% of the traffic would be out-of-staters, so let’s just save the money.

Nevertheless, in the 1951 opening ceremonies, then-Gov. Alfred Driscoll proudly declared that because of the new turnpike, “Motorists can now see the beauty of the real New Jersey.”

Decades of Jersey Turnpike jokes followed.

Most of the turnpike, which some N.J. state troopers call the Black Dragon, is designated I-95. Originally, the toll road stretched just over 117 miles north from the Delaware Memorial Bridge to U.S. Route 46 in Ridgefield Park. That was the northern end until 1991.

Then something funny happened.

Now, bear with me for a bit of New Jersey political background. I promise it will take us to the war between Sam and the New Jersey Turnpike.

In the recession of 1991, then-Gov. Jim Florio was already under fire for raising taxes, but he still needed to find $400 million for the next year’s budget. He couldn’t raise taxes again, and someone must have pointed out that the semi-independent New Jersey Turnpike Authority could raise $400 million by issuing bonds. Good idea but for one thing. The law said the authority couldn’t just hand the money to the state. That would make the turnpike the state’s piggy bank. How to get around that pesky law?

Aha! An idea. Make it a business deal! Florio could sell something to the turnpike for the $400 million. OK, but what? The statehouse? Jersey City? A highway? That’s it! A highway! But which one? The answer to that was obvious. Why, the northernmost piece of I-95, the chunk that ran from the turnpike’s northern end to the George Washington Bridge, of course!

The 4.4-mile stretch of 10-lane highway climbs in a wide arc from the meadows of Ridgefield Park up to the mouth of the mighty bridge on the Jersey Palisades. Sure, it was built with federal funds, but it belonged to the state of New Jersey. Florio could hand it over to the turnpike, which also belongs to New Jersey, and collect $400 million in the process? Why not? The feds would have nothing to say. Clever, eh? Florio and the legislature forced the turnpike to go along. The state budget was made whole.

But now the turnpike had to pay off the bonds that provided the money. So, the turnpike imposed a big toll increase, 70% for cars and a whopping 100% for trucks. That’s when Sam Cunninghame’s phone began to ring.

Sam Cunninghame was the executive director of the New Jersey Motor Truck Association, and his members were pissed. Really pissed. They wanted him to do something about the toll increase that was going to hit them hard. For example, the higher tolls would be a major tax on trucks that moved in and out of the huge central Jersey warehouse ghetto that supplied both New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas. Interstate carriers were ticked off too.

Sam Cunninghame was a good guy to have on your side. He was a sturdy fireplug of a guy, an ex-Marine and former New Jersey state trooper with no tolerance for foolishness. If his members said this crazy toll increase was foolishness, then Sam didn’t like it. It was his job to get the turnpike and Gov. Florio to back down – or at least to try. And Sam tried.

For more than a year, Sam and his association members cajoled the administration and lawmakers, warning that truckers were avoiding the turnpike because of the tolls.

The Florio administration responded with a study that found no diversion of trucks from the turnpike. Well, almost none. OK, so maybe there were fewer trucks, the state admitted, but that was because the country had been in recession. It had nothing to do with the higher tolls. With that study, and finally having pulled all the political strings he had with no results, Sam took the N.J. Motor Truck Association to war with New Jersey Turnpike. They declared a boycott.

In South Jersey truckers could use I-295 that paralleled the turnpike. In central and north Jersey, they could take old U.S. Routes 1 or 130. Both had been prime truck routes before the turnpike, back when they sliced through mile after mile of farmland. But in 1991, 40 years after the turnpike opened, most of that farmland was covered with strip malls and suburban homes.

Jersey truckers already knew how to get around the turnpike, but many interstate companies and drivers did not. So Sam had alternate-route maps printed and sent them to every commercial and private carrier east of the Mississippi River he could find.

Even if the state study saw no change, the suburbanites definitely noticed all those extra trucks on Routes 1 and 130 – especially big 18-wheelers. They didn’t like it, and they started to complain.

Meanwhile, Sam kept writing letters to the editor and news releases. He attended events and talked to the press at every opportunity.

The message began reaching the government in Trenton.

But Trenton wasn’t backing down. In fact, when Florio left office and Christie Whitman took over in 1994, things got worse. She appointed a guy named Roger Nutt to head the turnpike. Roger was a hard-ass. He enjoyed facing down unions and provoking bureaucratic showdowns. There was no way he would back off on tolls. Quite the opposite. Roger wanted to raise tolls again. He regarded Sam and his boycott as no more than a gnat he couldn’t be bothered to swat.

But those trucks on Routes 1 and 130 were real and having a growing impact. Whitman, a politically savvy lady, saw the problem. She told Roger there would absolutely not be another toll increase. But, like I said, Roger loved confrontation, so he took his financial case for another toll increase to the media. I guess he thought he could outmaneuver the governor.

Roger laid out his case in what was then the New Jersey section of The New York Times. I was the freelancer they hired to write the story. Of course, I called Sam for comment. I don’t remember Sam using foul language, but he was not at all happy with Roger. And – to no one’s surprise – neither was Gov. Whitman.

Shortly after The Times story appeared, Gov. Whitman fired Roger Nutt. In his place, she named a political loyalist named Ed Gross. By now, the pressure to do something about all those trucks on suburban highways was reaching critical mass.

And then one day, Sam Cunninghame’s phone rang again.

This time it was Ed Gross calling on behalf of the New Jersey Turnpike. There would be no new toll increase, Ed told Sam. And even though the state had claimed no trucks left the turnpike, Ed admitted that they had. The turnpike doesn’t want to lose any more truck traffic, he said. In fact, the turnpike wants to win back the truckers who left.

Even though the 1991 toll hike was still in place, Sam Cunninghame had won.

“I feel vindicated,” Sam told a newspaper. “I feel that we had an impact on the whole issue. It’s just a crime that people didn’t come to talk to us sooner.”

The war was over, but the settlement was disappointing.

To patch up relations with truckers, Ed Gross staged a “listening” event. The turnpike rented a catering hall in central Jersey and invited truckers to come and share their problems and suggestions with turnpike executives. The honchos listened briefly to truckers’ beefs and then explained at length why each idea was no good and why things couldn’t change. At least there was free coffee and buns.

Ed also had promised Sam a trucks-only service area. That idea had been floated before but died when folks who lived along the turnpike objected. It died this time too for the same reason. There is still no trucks-only service area on the turnpike.

In the end, nothing material changed – except maybe the attitude of the mighty New Jersey Turnpike. Truckers would no longer be ignored, Ed pledged.

Unfortunately, Ed Gross went on to badly bungle the installation of E-ZPass on the N.J. Turnpike in 2000. The damned system kept issuing bogus nonpayment notices and fines. Ed was fired in 2002. He died in 2011.

Roger Nutt did just fine, ending up as CEO of the Pennsylvania Turnpike Authority. He resigned from that job in 2012 but disappears from Google after that.

Christie Whitman was appointed to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by President George W. Bush in 2001, but not before she made sure big, interstate trucks were all back on the turnpike for good. While still governor, she had big trucks restricted to National Network highways in New Jersey. That means big trucks – particularly interstate trucks – going north or south have to use the turnpike whether they like it or not.

Sam Cunninghame left the state trucking association later in the 1990s and went on to head a group of port haulers in Port Newark. He talked a tough game there too. Sam died in 2013.

And that big increase that sent him to war? In 1991, the toll for a five-axle truck to travel the length of the turnpike went from $9.10 to $18.20. Today, the cash toll for same ride is $69.70.

Oh yeah. That chunk of I-95 that the turnpike still owns? It includes a junction with I-80, the eastern terminus of the interstate that runs west to San Francisco. Conceivably, the New Jersey Turnpike could place tolls between I-80 and the George Washington Bridge, a lucrative toll spot if ever there was one. The turnpike says they won’t. State government says they won’t. But there is no law that says they can’t.

Keep an eye on that one, dear readers. After all, we’re talking about New Jersey here. LL