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What is New Jersey 2025 Strategic Highway Safety Plan?
The New Jersey 2025 Strategic Highway Safety Plan (NJ 2025 SHSP) is a statewide, coordinated safety plan that provides a comprehensive framework for reducing fatalities and serious injuries on all public roads.
The NJ 2025 SHSP is an action-oriented and data-driven, comprehensive plan integrating the 4Es of safety:
Education
Enforcement
Engineering
Emergency Response
Learn more about the 4Es of safety here.
The NJ 2025 SHSP establishes statewide goals, emphasis areas, strategies, and actions to guide safety programs and investments. The NJ 2025 SHSP is developed in consultation with federal, state, local and private safety stakeholders. You can learn more about the NJ 2025 SHSP and other FHWA Highway Safety programs in “Building Links to Improve Safety: How Safety and Transportation Planning Practitioners Work Together.”
Highway safety improvement projects funded with Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) funds are required to be consistent with New Jersey's SHSP. The projects should logically flow from identified SHSP emphasis areas and strategies.
The NJ 2025 SHSP Mission, Vision, and Goal
Move towards zero deaths by investing in proven safety countermeasures and promoting a positive culture of safety.
New Jersey’s vision is zero deaths on all public roads. Achieving this long-term vision will require changes in attitudes and behaviors as well as physical improvements to the roadway system to reduce the frequency and severity of crashes.
It is not acceptable to say that traffic crashes and the resulting fatalities and injuries are the price we pay for mobility. Achieving zero deaths on our roadways is a shared responsibility, and necessitates a coordinated, system-wide commitment involving all roadway users in collaboration with the state’s safety stakeholders.
New Jersey will reduce fatalities and serious injuries using the 4Es: Education, Enforcement, Engineering, and Emergency Response.
The mission of New Jersey’s safety programs and its SHSP is to reduce fatalities and serious injuries on its roadways by addressing infrastructure and behavioral factors contributing to crashes and utilizing and combining multiple strategies to achieve the greatest safety benefits.
While New Jersey made great progress in making roadways safer for all users through infrastructure investments such as guide rail, pedestrian signals, and crosswalks, data confirms that most crashes occurring on New Jersey and the nation’s roadways are largely the result of unsafe behavior such as distraction, impairment, fatigue, and speeding. The coordination between infrastructure investments and behavioral change programs is critical to realizing the greatest safety improvements for the traveling public.
Eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by the year 2040.
New Jersey set a goal to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by the year 2040. This commitment was solidified in 2025 when the state enacted legislation that officially established the "Zero Deaths" initiative as a guiding principle for transportation planning and safety efforts. The law recognizes that traffic deaths are preventable, not inevitable, and calls for a comprehensive, statewide effort to make roads safer for everyone—whether people are driving, walking, biking, or using public transit. By adopting this goal, New Jersey is taking a strong stand that even one life lost is one too many, and that achieving safer roadways will require the collective action of government agencies, local communities, and all roadway users.
The Safe System Approach
To achieve this Vision, Mission, and Goal, New Jersey has adopted the Safe System Approach to reach zero fatalities and serious injuries on its roads and will be guided by it as the NJ 2025 SHSP is developed.
The Safe System Approach works by building and reinforcing multiple layers of protection to both prevent crashes from happening in the first place and minimize the harm caused to those involved when crashes do occur. It is a holistic and comprehensive approach that provides a guiding framework to make places safer for people. This is a shift from a conventional safety approach because it focuses on both human mistakes and human vulnerability and creates a system with many redundancies in place to protect everyone.
Learn more about the Safe System Approach from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
