By George Moffatt
New Jersey has thousands of miles of state and interstate high-speed highways. “The Garden State” is clearly becoming “The Corridor State.”
Today, 18-wheelers and “last mile” delivery trucks dominate our highways, county roads, and even residential streets. With the growth of storage and order fulfillment centers, gas and soot-belching diesel trucks are increasing the state’s already dangerous air and water toxins, polluting rivers (parking lot runoff), and creating 24-7 noise, dust, and traffic.
Diesel emissions are linked to asthma, cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, stroke. A recent study blamed transportation sector emissions for 22,000 premature deaths in the United States in 2015.
Nevertheless, local officials may still pitch, “We have to develop our community,” and, “We need the jobs and tax ratables,” when vying for warehouses. They may not give adequate thought to the size of these buildings, which range from hundreds of thousands to millions of square feet. Or, due to zoning or the need for tax revenue, they may have little choice in the matter.
How bad can warehouses be? Count the loading docks. A 5.5 million-square-foot warehouse complex planned for Central Jersey will have 910 loading docks and very likely hundreds of 18-wheelers per day. And nighttime operations could augment the air and noise pollution by adding lighting glare.
Areas favored by warehouse developers and their tenants are urban zones; highway interchanges and railroad connections; shuttered malls that can be converted to warehouses; and cheapest of all, undeveloped land, including farms and forests. New Jersey’s warehouses (see map) are most concentrated in northeast New Jersey, along the I-287 corridor, Middlesex County, and from Burlington County to Gloucester County (map page 6). But with New Jersey’s network of roads, trucks are everywhere.
There are at least 1,900 warehouses in New Jersey, up 36% since 2000, according to a 2022 Sierra Club report. Certainly, many more will come. Among them may be a 4 million-square-foot warehouse off Route 22 and Route 31 in Clinton Township. If it is truly a single building, it would cover 92 acres and easily rank as one of the largest warehouse facilities in North America. ExxonMobil recently notified the township that it intends to sell hundreds of acres to make room for the development.
Nationwide, warehouses have increased 55% since 2000, from 25,301 to 42,309, according to the Sierra Club report. They are exploding due to ever-expanding e-commerce, declining shopping malls and downtown stores, and rising manufacturing output. US warehouses employ over 2 million people, not including truckers. In 2020, Amazon became the largest employer in New Jersey (40,000). Sadly, the adequacy of wages and benefits is often disputed.
Warehousing Isn’t Going Away
Of course, we can blame Covid-19 and its variants for forcing us to order items online, but we must own up to our preference for deliveries on our doorstep, often just hours after we hit “send.”
With encouragement like this, warehouse traffic and pollution can spread like ink into surrounding communities and regions. New Jersey is still in the very early stages of finding ways to regulate their environmental and infrastructure impacts.
Legislation to solve some of New Jersey’s warehouse problems failed to pass last year, but in September the NJ State Planning Commission adopted guidelines for municipalities on handling applications. However, it’s only guidance and doesn’t have the iron backbone of law.
Although the warehouse boom appears unstoppable, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, and Washington have adopted California’s requirement that, year by year, more medium- and heavy-duty trucks sold in these states must be zero-emission vehicles. Yet, despite their public environmental claims, truck manufacturers are opposing these benchmarks.