A roundabout solution in search of a problem

Burlington County has failed to justify the environmental impact of a road project in Shamong.

New Jersey has a habit of skipping the cheap fix and going straight to the expensive one, and a proposed roundabout in Shamong’s Pinelands corner is the latest example.

At a May meeting of the Pinelands Commission, people showed up angry. Shamong Township residents, their mayor, a local farmer, and even a council president from a neighboring town showed up in person and called in to share their thoughts. They all gave public comments pushing back on Burlington County’s plan to replace a quiet rural intersection at Stokes and Willow Grove roads with a modern single-lane roundabout.

Beneath their frustration lies an argument that the Pinelands Commission should take seriously: In an ecologically sensitive region, the burden of proof for disruptive infrastructure must be high, and the county hasn’t come close to meeting it.

To be fair, roundabouts are not inherently bad environmental choices. A well-built roundabout can reduce vehicle idling, lower emissions, and manage stormwater more effectively than a conventional signalized intersection. Traffic engineers have good reasons to prefer them, so the problem in Shamong isn’t the concept, it’s the context. When designing an intersection from scratch, large-scale disruption of the area is already baked into the plan.

However, the calculus is different for remodeling, as less disruptive solutions may be available. At an intersection that already exists, the guiding principle should be simple: do the least disruptive thing that actually solves the problem.

That principle leads directly to the question Burlington County still hasn’t answered: What problem, exactly, are we solving?

The traffic study undergirding this project dates to around 2017, and residents argue that its core assumptions have collapsed. The Atco Speedway, which once drew significant regional traffic through the area, abruptly closed in 2023. Nearby residents testified at the commission meeting that traffic through the intersection has been roughly halved as a result.

Shamong’s acting municipal clerk formally requested an updated study, and the county has not provided one. Designing a major infrastructure project for traffic congestion from a bygone era just doesn’t make sense.

Even if the county could demonstrate a genuine safety need, the leap to a full roundabout is hard to justify without first exhausting lower-impact options.

Mayor Michael Di Croce and the Township Committee have proposed a range of alternatives: a four-way stop, flashing beacons, enhanced signage, rumble strips, and additional lighting. They are standard traffic-management tools that have worked at comparable intersections across New Jersey, but the county does not appear to have seriously engaged with any of them.

This pattern of skipping past proportionate, less expensive interventions to jump directly to the most costly and disruptive solution should sound familiar. It’s exactly what has played out in the artificial turf debate across the state and country, where municipalities have repeatedly torn out natural grass fields and replaced them with expensive synthetic surfaces.

The losers are the members of the taxpaying public, who would have saved half the expense if they had simply invested in skilled field managers and natural turf maintenance, with significantly better end results for player health and the environment. In both cases, we see an institutional tendency to treat large infrastructure spending as inherently synonymous with progress.

The question of spending priorities is hard to ignore. One commenter at the commission noted that residents in Chesterfield have actively requested a roundabout at a genuinely congested intersection, yet the county has declined to engage with that request.

Meanwhile, intersections with serious pedestrian safety problems, including the crossing at Springdale and Church roads in Mount Laurel, where pedestrians routinely walk in traffic to cross the Turnpike overpass, continue to wait.

Spending decisions that bypass genuine problems in favor of contested projects invite exactly the kind of public skepticism that was on display at the commission.

The Pinelands Commission’s regulatory jurisdiction in this case is appropriately specific to the environmental impacts to the area, so it cannot rule on whether a roundabout is the right intersection type. But it can and should scrutinize whether this project’s footprint of tree clearing, impervious surface expansion, and stormwater impacts are genuinely justified in a region where ecological fragmentation carries outsized consequences. As Mayor Di Croce noted before the commission, once these natural resources are disturbed, they cannot simply be restored.

The commission should press Burlington County for answers it has so far declined to give: a current traffic study, a documented analysis of lower-impact alternatives, and a clear explanation of why the most disruptive option is also the most necessary one. If those answers aren’t forthcoming, then denial is the appropriate response, not because roundabouts are bad, but because the Pinelands deserves better than a county agency bulldozing ahead while pointing to stale data.

Shamong’s residents are not anti-infrastructure. They’re just asking for evidence, which should not be an unreasonable bar to set in the Pinelands.