BAYONNE — Traffic nightmares all too familiar to motorists who use the New Jersey Turnpike Hudson County Extension near exit 14A may be coming to an end thanks to a new system being used at a nearby port facility.
Truck drivers bound for the Global Terminal Center (GCT) in Bayonne are now required to make an appointment in order to enter the terminal from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., according to The Wall Street Journal.
GCT Bayonne is the first terminal on the east coast to require appointments. Efsanebahis A handful of other terminals on the west coast have implemented appointment systems, because of similar back-logs of cargo shipments, the newspaper reported.
The appointment system went into effect Jan. 15, and the facility later extended the window of appointment registry for drivers entering the terminal from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Trucks trying to get into the 170-acre container port facility on the Bayonne/Jersey City border often backed up along Port Jersey Boulevard, the road leading to the terminal’s entrance. This, coupled with the ongoing construction on the Interchange 14A Improvement Project, at times created long traffic backups on the Newark Bay Bridge.
To alleviate the congestion, city officials in late 2015 tried providing a designated area for trucks to queue, but the 2-mile-long queuing area wasn’t large enough to hold the number of trucks coming in.
Motorists using the Turnpike Extension were met by heavy traffic in late 2015 and 2016 on the Turnpike Extension near Exit 14A due to long lines of trucks waiting to enter GCT Bayonne.
The problem had been exacerbated due to a 10 percentage increase of cargo containers from 2014 to 2015 that local commerce was responsible for transporting into marine terminals. Meanwhile, the Bayonne Bridge improvement project — which will raise the bridge’s span to allow larger ships to pass beneath it — is also expected to increase the volume of cargo shipments at the port.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
