COURT HOUSE – A visit from the commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Transportation confirmed something that county leaders had long suspected: Route 55, a state road that serves as the main entry point into Cape May County for Philadelphia visitors, will not be extended past its current end point in Port Elizabeth.
The commissioner, Francis O’Connor, spoke at the Cape May County Chamber of Commerce’s February luncheon, addressing business leaders and the county commissioners, among others in attendance.
“We aren’t pursuing the concept of extending 55,” O’Connor said. “You have to realize just the cost and environmental issues we would run into … We know there’s congestion down here. But it’s too costly, and the impact – it goes through a state forest – would just be too great.”
Route 47, which connects to Route 55 at its south end in Cumberland County and takes visitors the rest of the way to the shore, is a two-lane road that often clogs with traffic on Fridays and Sundays in the summer. Congestion commonly occurs where the route intersects with local roads, such as at Hand Avenue and Swainton Goshen Road in Middle Township.
Route 55, by contrast, is seldom backed up and is a four-lane highway separated by a median.
Politicians, activist groups and letter-writers to the Herald and other outlets have long hoped that the highway could be extended all the way into Cape May County. The so-called “road to nowhere” was at one time planned to connect with the Garden State Parkway in Middle Township, but it now ends in a nondescript section of forest northwest of Cape May County.
“This conversation has been going on since the 1960s,” O’Connor said.
Route 55, when it was conceived by the New Jersey Expressway Authority Act in 1962, was originally called the Cape May Expressway. Plans to connect it to the Cape were floated with two feasibility studies, in 1975 and 1993, that ultimately led to dead ends and cost estimates that, accounting for inflation, totaled over a billion dollars.
The proposed extension, according to environmental activists quoted in a 2000 New York Times feature, “ROAD AND RAIL: Seeking a Line in the Sand,” would “destroy some of the state’s most ecologically fragile land” to alleviate “congestion that lasts perhaps 300 hours a year.”
That New York Times feature recapped the last flurry of major activity around Route 55’s proposed extension southward. It focused on a New Jersey Senate resolution urging the state Department of Transportation to finally complete the highway. That resolution was spurred by a state senator who hailed from North Wildwood, James S. Cafiero.
The resolution kicked up a hornet’s nest of new opposition. The 1993 feasibility study showed that a new stretch of 55, which would split from the current Route 47, would require the destruction of major sections of undisturbed wetlands. “40 percent of the highway would cross wetlands,” The New York Times reported.
State Sen. Michael Testa (R-1), who represents Cape May County, introduced a resolution to the Senate in 2022 urging the federal government to fund the project. The resolution was dead in the water; it never left the Senate Transportation Committee and received no co-sponsors.
Were the project to go through, it would slice up not only wetlands but Belleplain State Forest, which is part of the largest remaining example of the Atlantic coastal pine barrens ecosystem.
County Commissioner Bill Barr, at the Feb. 25 commissioners meeting, said: “I think it’s time that we begin to come to grips with the reality that Route 55 isn’t going to happen for a host of reasons. We need to put our heads together and come up with alternatives to that project. Hopefully we will have more on that in the future.”
Contact the author, Collin Hall, at 609-886-8600, ext. 156, or by email at chall@cmcherald.com.
