How will widening of Route 34, 537 impact Monmouth County traffic?

The widening of Routes 34 and 537 in Monmouth County as well as updating the traffic signals are just some of the roadwork that has concluded, but the true test of its effectiveness may come around Memorial Day and beyond with more drivers on the road.

Monmouth County Commissioners held a ribbon cutting ceremony last week as a major project got wrapped up where they also announced the replacement of the CR 537 bridge (1300-A18), replacement of the SR 34 bridge (1308-152) and installation of bio-retention basins.

Commissioner Director Tom Arnone says they've widened the roads by adding lanes including more to make a left turn, which up until now, had created heavy bottleneck delays.

"For thru traffic, we added a lane on each side plus turning lanes on all four corners which made a tremendous alleviation of the bottleneck," Arnone tells 92.7 WOBM News.

Your long drives of sitting in bottleneck traffic getting impatient for cars to start driving faster, anxiously waiting in traffic for things to pick up so you're not late for a meeting, work or picking up your kids and waiting for someone to turn off so you can move up....could slowly now be turning into a thing of the past.

"Now, there's really no bottleneck there at all, it's all flow traffic," Arnone said.

Arnone anticipates the adding of lanes, including more to make left turns, will not only make your trip to and from quicker but also bring more tourists here by providing more lanes and roads to travel on.

"If you're giving them more opportunities to get to a destination, all other roads that are holding up traffic to get to that destination, gets spread out equally," Arnone said.

He adds instead of drivers avoiding certain roads, now they'll use them and loosen up congestion on other roads in the process.

"Instead of avoiding these roads, now they'll use them but that means it's being taken off another road, which alleviates congestion there," Arnone said.

This project on what would normally be considered state roads and state responsibility was done through a team effort between the County, the New Jersey Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration.

Monmouth County Government was given an opportunity to be the lead for this work over the state agencies "so that the project could advance."

It was completed almost entirely with Federal Aid Grant and State Aid Transportation Trust Fund dollars under the NJDOT and County agreement.

Arnone explained that the State provided 75% and the County provided 25% of the total $23.3 million dollars it cost to complete the project.

Those costs were then divided and paid out among all the construction crews who worked on the roads.

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