Why Your Roads Keep Failing, and Why Your Town Keeps Letting It Happen

The engineering of better pavement is settled. The system that decides what actually gets built is not.

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Drive anywhere in Bergen County right now and you will see orange barrels. June through September peak paving season in New Jersey, as crews have the temperatures and dry windows needed to lay asphalt properly. Yet many towns will spend the summer patching roads that will fail again by 2028, not because better options do not exist, but because the procurement, budgeting, and institutional systems governing what gets poured onto local streets were not designed to produce durable roads. Instead, those systems were designed to produce the lowest bid.

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What Asphalt Actually Is

The surface of virtually every residential street in New Jersey is Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA), a mix of crushed stone and gravel bound together by a semi-solid byproduct of crude oil refinement called bitumen. While the stone gives roads structural strength, bitumen is the binder holding the whole asphalt mix together, and is the variable that matters most.

Bitumen behaves differently at different temperatures. In summer heat, a road surface can reach 60°C (140°F), and softened bitumen deforms permanently under heavy truck traffic, wearing into grooves in a process called rutting. In cold weather, bitumen stiffens and the road surface cracks under thermal contraction. Those straight lines running across a lane every 20 feet are not temperature fractures, not wear marks.

Freeze-thaw damage follows. Water enters surface cracks caused by bitumen behavior at different temperatures, expands when frozen, widens the crack, then drains away and leaves a void. Northern NJ counties average 60 to 80 freeze-thaw cycles a year, and after enough of them, the road surface around that “void” breaks apart to become a pothole. Patching a pothole without sealing the initial crack that fed it is roughly the same as painting over a water stain without fixing the roof leak.

Binder choice drives how quickly all of this happens. Adding synthetic rubber-like modifiers to bitumen (polymer modification) makes asphalt mix more elastic when cold and more resistant to deformation when hot, extending its effective temperature range significantly. A 2024 study from LSU confirmed polymer-modified binders substantially outperformed unmodified ones on both rutting and cold-weather cracking. However, polymer-modified binder mixes cost 15 to 25 percent more than regular bitumen asphalt mixes per ton, which is almost always enough to get them cut from a municipal contract.

The Recycling Story Nobody Talks About

One genuine bright spot in road materials is Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP). When a road gets milled (the process of removing the top layer of an existing asphalt road to repair surface damage, smooth out bumps, and create a strong foundation for a fresh layer of pavement without having to rebuild the entire road) before resurfacing, the removed material is crushed stone and aged bitumen that can be processed and blended back into new mixes. 

According to NAPA, the industry recycled 101.4 million tons of RAP during the 2024 construction season, more than aluminum, glass, and paper combined, making asphalt pavement the most recycled material in the United States by tonnage.

FHWA research and a 2024 NCHRP report both found that mixes with 30 to 50 percent reclaimed material can match standard material performance while cutting CO₂ emissions roughly 35 percent per ton. The caveat is design rigor, as old road material has a stiffer, more aged binder than fresh bitumen, and blending too much of it into a new mix without adjusting the overall formula produces a road more prone to cold-weather cracking.

Towns that specify RAP as a sustainability checkbox without the accompanying engineering work can end up with worse roads than if they had used conventional materials.

How Towns Actually Buy Roads

Here is how procurement works for a typical Bergen County municipality, and why it reliably produces the cheapest road rather than the most durable one:

The town's engineer writes a road resurfacing specification referencing NJDOT's Standard Specifications for Road and Bridge Construction. For locally funded projects, that specification is usually stock language pulled from NJDOT's standard forms with minimal changes. Project contracts go out to competitive bid, and state law requires a contract to go to the lowest responsible bidder, meaning the contractor who proposes the cheapest materials that technically pass the spec wins, every time.

Consulting engineers writing the specification typically earns a fee tied to construction cost, so there is no financial reason to push for materials that might extend the road's life at a higher upfront price. And in many cases, the official who approved the project will be long gone before the road shows what it is actually made of.

State and federal funding introduces some oversight but does not change the underlying incentive. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) directed $350 billion toward highway programs, and its effects show in the 2025 ASCE Infrastructure Report Card, where national road grades improved from D to D+. But as of March 2026, only about 47 percent of IIJA funds had been obligated and 21 percent actually spent, per a GAO report from April 2025.

The Trump administration has added further uncertainty around IIJA disbursements, which complicates planning for municipalities that structured capital programs around that pipeline.

NJDOT's FY2025 Municipal Aid program distributed $150 million in grants to 540 communities in November 2024, with a meaningful change. Pavement preservation was added as a funded category for the first time, letting towns use grant dollars for crack sealing and preventive surface treatments rather than only reconstruction. Changes to how municipalities spend that money depends on whether engineers actually write those treatments into their grant applications.

The Cost of Waiting

The Pavement Condition Index (PCI) is a 0-to-100 scale that the FHWA uses to measure road surface quality. Keeping a road above a PCI of 70 through regular preventive treatments costs roughly $3 to $8 per square yard over a 20-year horizon. Waiting until a road deteriorates below PCI 40 and then rebuilding from the base costs $40 to $80 per square yard, more in areas with the soft, water-saturated soils common across NJ's low-lying municipalities. 

FHWA has documented this relationship consistently and offers free analysis tools so municipalities can run the numbers on their own projects. 

The 2025 ASCE Infrastructure Report Card found that roads in poor condition cost each NJ motorist $713 per year in vehicle damage, wasted fuel, and lost time. Nationally, 39 percent of major roads remain in poor or mediocre condition. Most Bergen County municipalities have no formal system for tracking road surface conditions. Without that data, budget decisions default to political pressure; whoever shows up loudest at a council meeting gets their street resurfaced first.

Better Options That Rarely Get Built

Polymer-modified binders extend a road's effective temperature range well beyond what standard asphalt handles, making it more resistant to both summer rutting and winter cracking. A 2024 guidebook from Iowa State's Institute for Transportation, funded through FHWA's Targeted Overlay Pavement Solutions program, shows consistently longer service life on collector roads and arterials. The upfront premium is 15 to 25 percent. Across a 20-year service life, it is rarely the expensive choice.

Warm Mix Asphalt (WMA) is produced at lower temperatures than standard asphalt using additives or water-foaming processes, which cuts plant energy use, reduces emissions during paving, and extends NJ's paving window into late October, well past the point where standard asphalt can be properly compacted and bonded. FHWA has tracked WMA performance since the mid-2000s, and state DOT data shows it matches or outperforms standard hot-mix in most applications.

Permeable Pavement uses an open-graded surface mix over a crushed stone reservoir base, letting rainwater drain through the pavement and into the ground rather than collect on the surface or run into storm drains. For municipalities in the Saddle River, Hackensack River, and Passaic watersheds facing stormwater requirements, permeable pavement solutions reduce both flood runoff and the standing water that feeds freeze-thaw pothole cycles. The EPA and NJ DEP's 2023 Stormwater BMP Manual both approve it as a compliant stormwater practice, and while it’s not suited for heavy truck routes, most residential streets and parking areas don’t face that restriction.

Why Better Materials Do Not Get Specified

Low-bid procurement is law. Best-value contracting, where projected lifespan and technical quality can factor into who wins a contract, exists in federal procurement and some state work but is practically unavailable to NJ municipalities for road contracts. That single legal requirement is the primary mechanism producing inferior roads.

Capital and operating budgets are disconnected. The savings from a longer-lasting road show up in future operating budgets, often under different officials. The person who approves the capital spending gets no credit for the savings downstream.

Pavement condition tracking is not required. FHWA mandates condition monitoring for roads on the National Highway System but not for the local streets where most municipal money gets spent. Without data, there is no basis for prioritizing where preventive maintenance would do the most good.

Engineering conservatism makes sense given the incentives. Specifying an unfamiliar material creates professional liability if it underperforms. Standard NJDOT-minimum asphalt creates none. This is not negligence. It is a predictable response to a system that does not reward better choices.

What Change Would Actually Require

The technology we have to fix our road sustainability issues is not our limiting factor. The system to implement those solutions is what needs fixing.

NJDOT could require any municipality applying for Local Aid road funding above a defined threshold to demonstrate that their material choices represent the lowest long-run cost, not simply the lowest bid. Rutgers CAIT has technical tools calibrated specifically for NJ municipalities that lack in-house engineering capacity. The state legislature could authorize best-value procurement for road contracts above a defined dollar threshold, letting projected service life count in award decisions. NJDOT could require Local Aid applicants to submit a basic road condition survey for roads proposed for treatment, so grant dollars flow to streets where preventive work still makes sense financially

These possible solutions are not new technologies or large capital investments. They are changes to procurement law, funding conditions, and reporting requirements, which is exactly why these critical solutions are not integrated. Nobody campaigns on road condition surveys. 

But it’s also why a street near your house gets repaved on a four-year political cycle rather than a twelve-year engineering one, and why NJ drivers absorb $713 a year in vehicle damage because of it.