Potholes

(I recorded this piece with voice-to-text during my morning commute and then edited it into something vaguely resembling coherence after getting home.)

I'm stuck in traffic on the Garden State Parkway right now. This is my morning commute.  Every morning, I drive from exit 135 to exit 155, Rahway to Paterson. It's gonna be a long drive today, about an hour. Normally it's closer to 40 minutes, but on Mondays and Tuesdays the traffic's particularly bad, so I tend to take longer on those days.

Something that I think about a lot during my commute, specifically, is the atrocious state of New Jersey roads. New Jersey systematically underfunds its public transportation, so driving on crumbling roads makes you wonder where all the transportation money is going, because it doesn't seem like it's going to the roads either. Everything is a fucking pothole, even the Parkway (ever drove through the Union toll plaza going northbound in the left lane?) When there's roadwork done it's only done during rush hour, and it’s usually shoddy patchwork rather than full repaving. The highway medians are scuffed and graffitied on. I just drove under a bridge a little while ago where there were chunks of concrete missing from the edge of the bridge—and not from the railing part of the concrete where it could've been caused by an accident, but from the underside, where that's just the concrete cracking and falling off from age.

New Jersey is objectively a wealthy and thriving place, but the built environment is declining and well past its expiration date. We're up to 9.5 million people because we're actually growing quite fast, but everything that isn't a new apartment building is falling apart. (I'm driving under a big piece of shit bridge right now, rusty as hell.) It feels like—and looks like—everything in this state is decaying, declining, broken. In a lot of ways it feels like nothing here has been updated since the 20th century except for the new apartment buildings, and it's not like we don't have the money. As I said, New Jersey is objectively a very wealthy state! Still, it's evident that either our tax revenue isn't high enough, or the revenue that we're getting just isn't being spent on the public good—it's lining the pockets of politically connected. I think it's pretty clearly both here, because the cost of of decades of delayed road and rail maintenance is gonna be greater than if you could just maintain the roads and rails as you go along—aaaaaand there's a fence that's falling over on the side of the Parkway. That's just great. I'm driving through—I think this is Irvington. Irvington is poor and disinvested—well, not disinvested, the right word is underfunded or neglected. Irvington is poor, neglected, and mostly Black. So decay here is a sign of systemic racism, of urban decay, of urban disinvestment, but the thing is—the roads look like shit everywhere, not just in Irvington. Shit's falling down everywhere. Rot everywhere. Rust everywhere, chips and cracks, graffiti, it's all over. It's not even good graffiti. (Good graffiti can spruce a place up, but I digress.) My point is that the built environment being in poor condition is not exactly confined to the low-income areas of New Jersey. It's really everywhere, it's a statewide problem.

If you live in eastern Union County, you know St. George's Ave. If you live in Woodbridge or Carteret, you also know St. George's. St. George's is a piece of shit. It's one giant pothole and it's a main thoroughfare for Rahway, Linden, and a good chunk of Woodbridge too. I mean, you've got probably close to 100,000 people for whom St. George's is a main thoroughfare. My pharmacy is on St. George's. I drive on St. George's on my commute every day, and I'm sure it's murder on my car's suspension. I was driving from my home in Rahway to a doctors appointment on the other side of the county, close to the Morris County line, and that took me from Rahway all the way to Berkeley Heights. I mean, Rahway is middle-class, but the rest of what I drove through was wealthy— not middle-class, just straight-up rich. I drove through middle-class areas in Rahway and Woodbridge, but once you cross into Clark, that's rich. Drove down Lake in Clark—bumpy with potholes—until Lake turns into Martine in Scotch Plains, where I grew up. Rich town, shit roads, and the roads were always shit when I was a kid, too. I mean, it makes you wonder where the money's going, 'cause it's not like these wealthy towns and counties are strapped for cash. They're where the money lives, so where the fuck is the money going? It doesn't seem to be going to the roads or the trains or the buses or even the schools—instead of doing more permanent capital expenditures to accommodate population growth, I see more and more schools just throwing up trailers to accommodate growing student bodies as an ad hoc solution. It's not supposed to be permanent, but throwing up trailers instead of expanding campuses has been the norm in New Jersey, or at least in my part of Jersey, since I was a kid. My middle school did that too. I drove past my high school a few days ago, and my high school is very well-funded, it's very high-performing, and I saw multiple trailers outside. And if teachers are paid anything like what they were paid when I was when I was there, the teachers are underpaid relative to the state's going rate for teacher salaries, so payroll shouldn't be exorbitant. And they're still throwing up a fucking trailer. I mean, what does it say about about our government if fucking rich kids are learning in trailers? If the rich kids are in trailers, how bad are we failing the poor kids? That's what I'm stuck on. I just drove through East Orange. How bad is in East Orange? How bad is it in Paterson? If the roads are crumbling and the schools are bursting at the seams even in the wealthy suburbs, how bad is it in the cities? How much has to change for it to not be like this?

The primary focus of policymakers in Trenton seems to be the retention of older wealthy homeowners. And there's a pretty simple reason for that, which is that Trenton is run by older wealthy homeowners who are always thinking about moving to Florida, and their social circles are moving to Florida because unlike the legislators they don't all have public jobs keeping them tied down in New Jersey. The legislature is focused so focused on on keeping rich old folks here, but rich old folks are the ones who are least impacted by the degradation of our public infrastructure, the degradation of our public services at the state level. I mean, they're fucked by DOGE, but they rely on the federal government much more than the state government. They don't drive as much as the rest of us, they don't commute every day. They don't rely on the schools, they don't rely on NJTransit. The decay of our roads, our trains, our buses, our schools—it’s almost immaterial to them, and that's who we're focused on keeping. That's who were appropriating billions and billions of dollars every year for, to give them handouts to keep them here. Statistically, rich homeowners are fine! The people who are being pushed out of the state are young people like me and working-class families like those who live in cities like Paterson or Newark. They're getting priced out and driven out to Florida and Texas and Georgia and Pennsylvania because they can't afford to live in the more desirable urbanized parts of the state. They move out to the sticks, or they leave Jersey altogether and go to Philly or the Poconos or the South.

StayNJ is what I was referencing when I was talking about billions of dollars in handouts for rich homeowners. Rich homeowners are the ones who are least impacted by what I'm discussing. They drive the least, they commute the least, almost none of them have kids in schools, and their government benefits come from the feds, so our crumbling state-level public services aren't really a pressing concern for them, but their tax bill might be. That just seems like the wrong set of priorities for any policymakers, but especially for Democrats.

I'm in Bloomfield now. This stretch of the Parkway doesn't seem to have been cleaned in a while. There's some a lot of debris and scattered litter lining the median. I'm at mile marker 150 passing under a very, very rusted, actually abandoned railroad bridge. (A lot of abandoned railroads here! Would be nice if we, I don't know, made them into railroads again.) I do wonder just how wide open the lane is for a candidate on the Democratic side of things who's willing to acknowledge the fact that everything is fucking broken in Jersey—not just the system of government, but the actual physical infrastructure is just fucking broken. Everything is decaying. Everything is years or decades past its expiration date, and it's not like we don't pay taxes. So where the fuck is the money going?

I do think that Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop is trying to occupy this lane, but I think I think there's a bit of a problem in the way he frames it. He frames it as primarily about corruption, and while I agree that corruption is the cause for this—the reason that the roads don't get paved and the trains don't get repaired is because that money is all going to line somebody's pockets—but foregrounding corruption without tying it to material problems makes the pitch seem abstracted from the problems of daily life. While the unpleasant experience of interacting with government in New Jersey is all because of corruption, people don't experience corruption in their day-to-day. What they do experience is a pothole that blows out a tire, or a train that's half an hour late, or a parent-teacher conference in a fucking trailer cause that's where their kid's homeroom is. That is the concrete experience of public services and public infrastructure New Jersey: everything is breaking. I need to get my my real ID done, and I'm dreading it because I'm gonna have to go and deal with the DMV. (Technically it's called the Motor Vehicle Commission, but no one calls it that shit. It's the DMV.) I'm gonna have to go to the DMV and I'm dreading it because that means I have to deal with New Jersey government, and dealing with New Jersey government means that something's gonna be broken. Something's gonna be frustrating. It's gonna take a huge amount of time. It's gonna suck and I'm gonna walk away with complaints. Thatis people's baseline experience with government in New Jersey at all levels, not just state government but county and municipal government as well.

I think the first candidate to run on real reform in a way that connects it to materially improving shit that people interact with every day—whether it's their kids' school, or the roads they drive on, the train or bus they take to work—the first person who says here's how I'm gonna improve your day-to-day, the first person to acknowledge that your day-to-day is not just “unaffordable” but broken. I think Steve Fulop is the one who's coming the closest to doing that, and I think Ras Baraka is the only other gubernatorial candidate who could credibly make that case other than Fulop. (I don't see Baraka currently making the case, but he could.) It’s an argument that’s an indictment of the past several decades of leaderhsip in New Jersey, so only the brave will dare to make it; it’s also an argument that's only available to Baraka and Fulop, for two reasons. One, because they've both been mayors of major cities who've actually delivered a fairly good policy record, and two, because they're the only two candidates with any credibility whatsoever as progressive or anti-machine or outsider, so they're the only two candidates who can deliver that pitch with a straight face. My gut says that this lane is going to actually end up going to Fulop. I think he consolidates that lane as people start paying more attention, and I think that's amplified if he reframes or refines his message and talks more about the concrete costs of corruption in New Jersey, not just vague talk about the corruption tax but specific examples of things that are broken, things that are that are failing us, because the money that was intended to make them work is lining somebody's pockets instead. It's one of those things that will make him some enemies, but he's already made every enemy you can make, with his slate of Assembly candidates and all that.

I think that the issue of anticorruption in New Jersey is a potent one in isolation, but I think it's even more potent if you make a deliberate effort to connect it to the sorry state of public services and public infrastructure in New Jersey, and you make the effort to agitate about those things to make people mad, to get people to internalize that they do deserve better and that broken is not the natural state of public infrastructure. Brokenness is a choice, and it is the choice that our politicians have made over the past decades because broken is cheaper and easier.

This is gonna be over soon because I've arrived at work in Paterson. To park, I'm gonna be driving over a giant fucking pothole 'cause the roads in Paterson are shit too.