Bear hunt starts Monday in New Jersey and so will the controversy it triggers

Bear dashes across urban street in New Jersey

Editor’s Note: The news release below was sent by the New Jersey Assembly Republican Office. Hunters likely will agree with its content. Others, not much or not at all. If you feel strongly about the subject, feel free to express yourself by clicking on the Leave a Comment link above.

SPACE SAYS BEAR HUNT MAKES NEW JERSEYANS SAFER, SHOULD BE PERMITTED ON STATE-OWNED LANDS

TRENTON, N.J. – With the six-day October bear hunt starting Monday, Assemblyman Parker Space is asking the Legislature to advance his bill (A169) to establish the Fish and Game Council as the sole entity responsible for regulating hunting, fishing and trapping and prohibit the closing of state-owned lands for such purposes without consent from the council. Last year, Gov. Phil Murphy signed an executive order banning bear hunting on all state-owned lands – an attempt at fulfilling a campaign promise that he would end the hunt altogether.

     “Before Gov. Murphy took office, we had a sound bear management plan in place and there is absolutely no reason to stop hunting on state-owned lands,” said Space (R-Sussex). “The bear hunt has proven to be very effective at keeping the population in check and limiting human encounters. Murphy’s motives are purely political and go against expert recommendations and decades of research.”

     Black bears in New Jersey have been responsible for property damage, car accidents, livestock kills, pet attacks, human attacks, and one human fatality (in 2014). A 2016 study by researchers at Utah State University, found human-bear conflicts in New Jersey declined by about 20 percent the year after a hunt. In the years following an absence of a hunt, it rose by approximately the same amount. In 2009, a year without a hunt, there were 2,714 black bear damage and nuisance reports. Last year, there were 703.

     “New Jersey has one of the healthiest bear populations in the nation and we have controls in place to ensure we don’t exceed the harvest goal,” said Space.

     According to the Division of Fish and Wildlife, black bears have been sighted in all of the state’s 21 counties. The Utah State University study stated New Jersey’s bear numbers are “on par with the rich salmon streams in Southeast Alaska.” While there is no exact count of black bears in New Jersey, most estimates range between 3,500 and 4,000.

     The total harvest goal for the October and December bear hunts is between 20 and 30 percent of tagged bears that year. The December hunt can be extended by four days if the numbers are less than 20 percent or it could be canceled altogether if hunters reach the 30 percent goal in October.

     “Politicians against the bear hunt like to play into people’s emotions, but a 400 pound bear can do some serious damage,” said Space. “We have seen nearly a 70 percent decrease in the number of black bear disturbances over the last decade in which we’ve had a hunt.”

     New Jersey has a comprehensive, multi-year bear management plan to address the bear population, human-bear conflicts and bear emigration. The plan states that without regulated sport hunting, New Jersey’s black bear population will double in five years.

     Space also has a proposal for a constitutional amendment to preserve the right of people to fish, hunt, trap and harvest fish and wildlife in New Jersey. It is waiting to be heard in both Assembly and Senate committees.

If you liked this post you’ll love our daily newsletter, EnviroPolitics.
It’s packed with the latest news, commentary and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond.
Don’t take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

Bear hunt starts Monday in New Jersey and so will the controversy it triggers Read More »

Jersey Shore could suffer beach erosion as stalled storm hits with gusty winds

By Jeff Goldman | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

A coastal flood warning has been issued starting Thursday afternoon for much of the Jersey Shore as a stalled weather system off the coast continues to batter beaches with gusty winds and mounting high tides, prompting concerns over significant beach erosion.

The National Weather Service describes the storm as a “long duration coastal flood event” with flood watches upgrading to warnings as of 4 p.m. Thursday and lasting until 1 a.m. Saturday for Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland and Ocean counties. Flooding is expected to hit the moderate stage at the high tides Thursday night and Friday in Jersey Shore towns in those counties.

Minor flooding is expected along bays and beaches in Monmouth, Middlesex and Salem counties, as well as along the Delaware River. Those areas remain under a coastal flood watch.

Significant beach erosion is expected along the Shore “due to the prolonged nature of the event,” the weather service said.

The flooding is being driven by multiple days of strong on-shore winds with gusts up to 40 mph.

“This event affects 5 consecutive high tide cycles dating back to Wednesday evening,” the National Weather Service said in its latest storm briefing Thursday morning. “Water will not be allowed to drain from many of the back bays and estuaries. As a result, the cumulative impacts may be significant.”

The low-pressure system in the Atlantic Ocean isn’t bringing much rain to New Jersey, though.

______________________________________________________________________

If you liked this post you’ll love our daily newsletter, EnviroPolitics.
It’s packed with the latest news, commentary and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond.
Don’t take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

Jersey Shore could suffer beach erosion as stalled storm hits with gusty winds Read More »

Acute wildfire danger has California power utilities pulling the plug on millions of customers

Armando Espinoza delivers paper products to a cafe in downtown Sonoma, Calif., where power is turned off, on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019. Pacific Gas & Electric has cut power to more than half a million customers in Northern California hoping to prevent wildfires during dry, windy weather throughout the region. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Armando Espinoza delivers paper products to a cafe in downtown Sonoma, Calif., where power is turned off, on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019…. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

By Janie Har and OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ of the Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Millions of people in California woke up in the dark Wednesday after Pacific Gas & Electric started shutting off power to prevent what the utility called an unprecedented wildfire danger.

PG&E said it cut power to more than 500,000 customers in Northern California and that it plans to gradually turn off electricity to nearly 800,000 customers to prevent its equipment from starting wildfires during hot, windy weather.

A second group of about 234,000 customers will lose power starting at noon, the utility said.

The utility plans to shut off power in parts of 34 northern, central and coastal California counties to reduce the chance of fierce winds knocking down or toppling trees into power lines during a siege of hot, dry, gusty weather.

Gusts of 35 mph to 45 mph (56-72 kph) were forecast to sweep a vast swath of the state, from the San Francisco Bay area to the agricultural Central Valley and especially in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where a November wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and virtually incinerated the town of Paradise.

The winds will be the strongest and most widespread the region has seen in two years, and given the scope of the danger, there was no other choice but to stage the largest preventive blackout in state history, PG&E said.

“This is a last resort,” said Sumeet Singh, head of the utility’s Community Wildfire Safety Program.

However, people should be outraged by the move, Gov. Gavin Newsom said. “No one is satisfied with this, no one is happy with this,” he said.

The utility needs to upgrade and fix its equipment so massive outages aren’t the norm going forward, he said.

It could take as many as five days to restore power after the danger has passed because every inch of power line must be checked to make sure it isn’t damaged or in danger of sparking a blaze, PG&E said.

The news came as residents in the region’s wine country north of San Francisco marked the two-year anniversary of deadly wildfires that killed 44 and destroyed thousands of homes. San Francisco is the only county in the nine-county Bay Area where power will not be affected.

To the south, Southern California Edison said more than 106,000 of its customers in parts of eight counties could face power cuts as early as Thursday as Santa Ana winds loomed.

The cutbacks followed a plan instituted after deadly wildfires — some blamed on downed PG&E transmission lines — destroyed dozens of lives and thousands of homes in recent years and forced the utility into bankruptcy over an estimated $30 billion in potential damages from lawsuits.

The outages Wednesday weren’t limited to fire-prone areas because the utilities must turn off entire distribution and transmission lines to much wider areas to minimize the risk of wildfires.

Classes were cancelled for thousands of schoolchildren and at the University of California, Berkeley, Sonoma State University and Mills College.

The California Department of Transportation said it was installing generators to avoid closing the Caldecott Tunnel linking the East Bay to San Francisco and the Tom Lantos Tunnel on State Route 1 in Pacifica.

“The tunnels can’t operate without power,” Caltrans tweeted.

PG&E had warned of the possibility of a widespread shut-off Monday, prompting residents to flock to stores for supplies as they prepared for dying cellphone batteries, automatic garage doors that won’t work and lukewarm refrigerators.

If you liked this post you’ll love our daily newsletter, EnviroPolitics.
It’s packed with the latest news, commentary and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond.
Don’t take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

Acute wildfire danger has California power utilities pulling the plug on millions of customers Read More »

Firefighting foam leaves a toxic legacy in Californians’ drinking water

Bethany Slavic Missionary Church

By DAVID S. CLOUDANNA M. PHILLIPSTONY BARBOZA, LA Times
OCT. 8, 2019 3 AM

SACRAMENTO —  It was a Sunday tradition at Bethany Slavic Missionary Church. After morning services, Florin Ciuriuc joined the line of worshipers waiting to fill their jugs with gallons of free drinking water from a well on the property, a practice church leaders had encouraged.

“I take it for my office every week,” said Ciuriuc, a 50-year-old Romanian immigrant and a founding member of the largely Russian-speaking church, which claims 7,000 congregants.

Church leaders boasted it was the cleanest water in Sacramento, according to Ciuriuc. In fact, test results showed the water contained toxic chemicals from firefighting foam used for decades on a now-shuttered Air Force base a mile away. Church leaders say they did not understand their well was contaminated.

The church’s well is one of thousands of water sources located on and near military bases polluted with chemicals from the foam, which was used by the armed services since the 1960s.

Defense Department officials know that the chemicals, called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have seeped into the groundwater underneath nearly two dozen military bases throughout the state. But the department has conducted only limited testing off base and cannot say how many civilian water sources they’ve polluted or who will pay for it.

Since 2016, when the Environmental Protection Agency classified PFAS as an “emerging contaminant” linked to liver cancer and other health problems, the Pentagon has found the pollutants at levels above federal health guidelines in soil and groundwater at more than 90 bases nationwide.

Bethany Slavic Missionary Church

California has the most of any state, with contamination at 21 bases, including six where the chemicals threaten the water supply in nearby communities, according to a review of hundreds of pages of Defense Department records by the Los Angeles Times.

In Riverside County, Barstow, Orange County and Sacramento, PFAS have been detected in private wells or public water systems outside the boundaries of military installations, records show.

At Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos and Fresno Air National Guard Base, the chemicals are suspected of moving into the community water supply.

One military contractor warned in September that residents “using groundwater for drinking water” near Los Alamitos “may potentially be exposed to migrating PFAS contamination.” Another contractor said in March that five wells west of the Fresno airfield could be affected.

But the Pentagon has not completed off-base testing at either location, and at other California bases, leaving the full extent of the contamination unknown.

The Pentagon faces the prospect of a gigantic environmental cleanup that officials estimate could cost in excess of $2 billion and take decades to complete. The day Defense Secretary Mark Esper took office in July, he appointed a task force to oversee the Pentagon response.

Wherever they have already found PFAS in drinking water above the EPA health advisory level of 70 parts per trillion, the military has supplied bottled water, paid for filters and purchased clean water for both military personnel and civilians, officials say.

Firefighting foam

“Our first priority is to cut off human exposure, and everywhere we’ve identified that someone’s drinking water is above the EPA health advisory level, we are doing everything we can to provide alternative drinking water,” Maureen Sullivan, deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment, said in an interview.

Citing limited funds from Congress for cleanup and testing, the Defense Department only acts when water sampling finds contamination levels above EPA health advisory level for two of the most common variations of PFAS.

The threshold, which was set in 2016, is nonbinding, and officials in several states have set much more stringent standards. Congress is currently debating whether to force the Trump administration to adopt an enforceable nationwide standard, a proposal the White House has said it opposes.

California regulators have few legal tools to force the Pentagon to expand its sampling to groundwater near bases.

“We’re doing everything we can to compel the owner, the Department of Defense, to conduct the investigations, to show us it’s not a problem,” said Doug Smith, assistant executive officer with Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, which monitors groundwater at seven California bases.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research organization, about 85% of Californians depend on groundwater for some portion of their water supply.

Regulators and environmental groups warn that the slow pace of Pentagon testing has left an unknown number of people drinking contaminated water.

“The PFAS plumes are spreading near these military bases, and DOD is turning a blind eye,” said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics, an environmental group that has pushed for more stringent PFAS cleanup standards.

Ruben Mendez

‘Forever chemicals’ spread

Nationwide, the chemicals have been found at 401 current and former military bases. When testing was conducted off-base, the pollutants were found in 1 in 4 wells and water systems, according to a 2018 Pentagon report to Congress.

Among them is the well at Ruben Mendez’s home in the Inland Empire.

Mendez said he had no reason to think something was wrong with his well water until Air Force officials knocked on his door a few years ago.

“They said, ‘We spilled something, and you need to stop drinking the water for a while,’” Mendez said in an interview on the front porch of his peach-colored home.

In 1993, when the Mendez family built the ranch-style home that Ruben, 64, and his 91-year-old mother now share, they settled on property about a mile southeast of March Air Reserve Base. They had a private well dug more than 400 feet down, and for years authorities came every few months to test the water. Mendez said he attributed these visits to his home’s proximity to the base.

March Air Reserve Base

In 2016, after the EPA set its health advisory, officials abruptly told the Mendezes and another family nearby to stop drinking the water.

“We thought we had nice, clean water,” Mendez said.

At that point, the Air Force “immediately contacted the two private well owners, provided them with bottled water and advised them not to use the well for any consumption purposes,” Air Force spokesman Mark Kinkade said.

The Air Force delivered free five-gallon jugs of water to the Mendez home for more than two years. In 2018, it paid to have the house connected to the municipal water system. Ruben Mendez said he now pays $100 a month for water he used to get for free.

Ruben Mendez

The toxic plume that spread from the base has also made its way into the public drinking-water system.

The Eastern Municipal Water District, which supplies a swath of the Inland Empire that is home to some 825,000 people — from Temecula to Moreno Valley and Perris to Hemet — closed one of its large supply wells in 2016 when the EPA set its new health advisory level for the chemicals.

“We took that well out of service the same day,” said Lanaya Alexander, the water district’s senior director of water resources planning.

But the chemicals had spread further south. In February, after a second well tested above California’s notification level, the district shut it down too.

An emerging health threat

Often referred to as “forever chemicals,” PFAS can persist indefinitely in the ground and water, be absorbed into people’s blood and accumulate in their bodies for years.

Some states and public health advocates say PFAS are harmful at much lower levels than the federal health advisory level of 70 parts per trillion. California requires state regulators to be notified at levels as low as 5.1 parts per trillion.

In January, a new state law will mandate that customers be told if any of the chemicals are detected.

Contamination from these chemicals come from many sources, not just aircraft foam. They were widely used in commercial products like nonstick pans, waterproof clothing and food packaging.

In Southern California, a major source of the pollutants is believed to be chrome-plating factories.

Most vulnerable are mothers and young children, whose reproductive and developmental health can be altered by even tiny amounts of the chemicals being passed to fetuses during pregnancy and to nursing infants through breast milk.

Since only small amounts can be absorbed through the skin, the greatest risk of exposure is from drinking contaminated water.

Firefighting foam is considered a major contributor to the contamination, because it contains high concentrations of PFAS. Developed by the Navy and 3M Co., the chemicals create a film that cools burning aircraft fuel and blankets flammable vapors.

Foam used in plane crash

Because of concerns about PFAS contamination, the Pentagon promised in 2016, after the EPA issued its health advisory, that it would phase out use of the foam. It has halted its use in training, but continues to apply it in aircraft fires.

Outrage over PFAS contamination has been building in the Midwest and on the East Coast for years, where companies like 3M, DuPont and its spin-off, the Chemours Co., which made the chemicals, have sought to downplay their health risks.

New Hampshire has set some of the toughest PFAS drinking-water limits in the country. Pennsylvania has tested the blood of residents in heavily-affected areas to measure their exposure. New Mexico’s attorney general sued the Air Force this year to compel the military to pay for the cleanup of two contaminated bases.

But in California, which state regulators say does not have any companies that manufactured PFAS, the scope of the contamination is only beginning to be understood.

California regulators have launched a multi-part investigation, focusing first on more than 600 drinking-water wells located within one or two miles of commercial airports and municipal landfills, where discarded household items release the chemicals.

They plan to widen their search in the coming months, sampling water from wells near military bases and manufacturing plants.

“We’re going to take it case by case,” said Dan Newton of the state Water Resources Control Board. “Where we find hot spots, we may chase those out further to identify plumes or areas of concern.”

Georgia base

High levels found, but not enough testing

One of the California bases with the highest levels of on-base contamination, Edwards Air Force Base, has carried out little testing off-site.

A vast aircraft testing facility in the high desert north of Lancaster, Edwards has 24 contaminated sites where firefighting foam was sprayed heavily.

At a training site where firefighters practiced dousing flames with the toxic foam, the contamination level in soil samples reached 18,000 parts per trillion, more than 250 times higher than the EPA threshold, according to a contractor’s 2018 report to the Air Force.

Tests of the base’s drinking water did not show high readings. Still, the environmental testing company hired by the military called for further investigation into whether chemicals from the foam were leaching into the groundwater, noting at least “39 off-base water supply wells are within a 4-mile radius” of a contaminated site at Edwards.

Federal and state regulators agreed that more testing was necessary.

In March, the EPA complained in an email to base authorities that while the base was conducting limited testing, it had made “no commitment to ensure the nature and extent of … PFAS contamination is investigated.”

California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control recommended in a July 22 letter to base officials that the Air Force expand its testing to include off-base wells.

Sanford Nax, a spokesman for the agency, acknowledged that regulators were concerned about “the limited nature of the sampling.”

The Air Force is preparing to do further on-base testing next month near the base’s northern boundary, it said in a statement. None of the 24 contaminated sites found at the base to date “are in close proximity to any on-base or off-base drinking water wells,” it said.

If future sampling finds contaminated drinking water that exceeds the EPA recommended level, “we will immediately provide alternate drinking water to impacted residences and facilities and begin working with the community and state regulators,” the statement added.

Other bases have even higher PFAS contamination.

At China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, a massive Navy testing facility and airfield near Ridgecrest, groundwater samples in 2017 turned up PFAS levels of 8 million parts per trillion, the highest in California.

Sampling in 2017 at Naval Base Ventura County found PFAS contamination of 1.08 million parts per trillion.

And near San Francisco, at Naval Air Station Alameda, the levels reached 336,000 parts per trillion, while at Marine Corps Air Station Tustin, a shuttered base in Orange County, samples were as high as 770,000 parts per trillion.

Recently released Pentagon documents obtained through a public records request by the Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy group, showed three more bases in California with elevated contamination levels.

They include Joint Forces Training Base, a California National Guard airfield in Los Alamitos, and Ft. Hunter Liggett, an Army training base in southern Monterey County. The third, Sierra Army Depot, a military storage facility, is located north of Lake Tahoe.

Although the military has tested on-base at all of the facilities, their response to the spreading of the contaminants to off-base drinking supplies has been spottier.

California regulators say there is little they can do to speed up the military’s testing or cleanup efforts around its contaminated bases. Because the EPA has delayed setting a standard for cleaning up groundwater contamination, the military has avoided large-scale remediation costs.

Mather Airport

Growing frustration with Pentagon response

In Rancho Cordova, a city of more than 72,000 people just east of Sacramento that abuts the former Mather Air Force Base, a drinking-water well owned by the California American Water Co., one of four utilities that sells water to the town’s residents, has been contaminated.

City Manager Cyrus Abhar said that when the tainted water was discovered, the Air Force assured him it would deal with the problem.

“The Air Force is not going to leave the local communities holding the bag,” Abhar said.

But several years after test results showed high PFAS readings, the Air Force has largely evaded responsibility for removing the contaminant.

Instead, California American Water has spent $1.3 million to build a treatment plant that filters PFAS out of the groundwater. The Air Force has not reimbursed it for this expense, said Evan Jacobs, a California American Water spokesman.

In a statement, the Air Force said, “Congress has provided no authority” to pay for constructing the facility, but that it was in negotiations with the company to pay for its operation costs.

In a sign of growing frustration with the Defense Department, the company has filed a property damage claim against the Air Force — a first step before a lawsuit.

Tim Miller, California American Water’s senior director of water quality, warned regulators at a meeting of the State Water Resources Control Board last spring that the Mather PFAS plume could grow.

“The risk of PFAS contamination continuing to spread in the groundwater basin underneath the city of Rancho Cordova is increasing,” he said.

If no one acted to prevent it, Miller said, the chemicals could leach into five more drinking-water wells within the next five years.

The pollutants have already reached Bethany Slavic Missionary Church, which is housed in a former health club a mile from Mather.

A deep well on the property supplies the Pentecostal church with its drinking water and is used to fill an outdoor swimming pool for baptisms.

Ciuriuc, one of the church’s founders, said he had no idea the Air Force was regularly testing the well for PFAS — or that the tests showed the contaminant level had risen from 14 parts per trillion in 2016 to 50 parts per trillion two years later.

Bethany Slavic Missionary Church

When the well was tested again in March, the chemicals had climbed to 59 parts per trillion, according to a letter disclosing the results the Air Force sent to the church’s pastor, Adam Bondaruk.

“The sample results” are “below the United States Environmental Protection Agency Lifetime Health Advisory level of 70 parts per trillion,” said the letter, a copy of which was provided by the church. “The Air Force is committed to protecting human health and the environment.”

Since the letter made no recommendations to limit use of the well for drinking water, the church initially took no action. When another sample was taken in June, it showed the contaminant level had dropped sharply — back to 16 parts per trillion.

But the church recently started taking precautions, after inquiries from The Times. Ciuriuc stopped taking water every Sunday. Highlands Community Charter School, which leases space from the church, began offering bottled water to its 44 adult students who attend class there.

Last month, church leaders padlocked the well.

If you liked this post you’ll love our daily newsletter, EnviroPolitics.
It’s packed with the latest news, commentary and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond.
Don’t take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

Firefighting foam leaves a toxic legacy in Californians’ drinking water Read More »

EPA sued by Alaska Natives and fishermen or reversing Pebble Mine decision

Lakes fan out beneath the wing of a float plane as it flies above tundra in July near the site of Pebble Mine in Alaska.
A floatplane flies over the tundra in July near the site of Pebble Mine, a proposed open-pit copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska.(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

By RICHARD READ, LA Time Seattle Bureau Chief
OCT. 8, 2019 4:12 PM

SEATTLE —Trump administration officials broke the law when they reversed course and gave a green light to a proposed copper and gold mine near Alaska’s Bristol Bay, mining opponents said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Alaska Native, commercial fishing and economic development organizations said the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision July 30 to step aside and let the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determine whether to permit the Pebble Mine was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion” and illegal.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage is the latest challenge to the project that the EPA’s Seattle branch criticized in written comments July 1 before abruptly reversing course, withdrawing the agency’s option to block the proposed open-pit copper and gold mine. Last year, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to preserve the agency’s veto option over the Army Corps permitting process, saying that mining in Bristol Bay’s headwaters could risk harming the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.

Representatives of the groups that filed the suit said at a news conference Tuesday in Anchorage that the Trump administration’s reversal ignored years of EPA research and public comments.

Don’t miss stories like this Click to receive free updates

“The politicians jumped in and changed the rules at the last minute,” said commercial fisherman Robin Samuelsen Jr., board chairman of the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corp., one of the plaintiffs.

An EPA spokeswoman declined to comment. The lawsuit names as defendants the EPA, its general counsel, Matthew Leopold, and agency Seattle Administrator Chris Hladick.

Mike Heatwole, a spokesman for the mining company, Pebble Ltd. Partnership, said that decisions on a “proposed determination,” as the EPA’s veto option is called, are “clearly within the discretion” of the agency administrator.

The suit argues that the agency changed course without good reason or explanation required by law, and asks that a judge nullify the move.|
_______________________________________________________________________________

If you liked this post you’ll love our daily newsletter, EnviroPolitics.
It’s packed with the latest news, commentary and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond.
Don’t take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.


EPA sued by Alaska Natives and fishermen or reversing Pebble Mine decision Read More »

NJ Transit’s self-driving shuttle could revolutionize transportation in NJ

By Michael Hill, NJTV News Correspondent | October 8, 2019, 5PM EST

Solutions engineer Aaron Foster offered a show-and-tell tour of Navya’s autonomous Michigan-made electric, self-driving vehicle to vendors at 2019’s NJ Council on Special Transportation Expo. With top speeds of 15 miles an hour and a maximum of 15 passengers, the shuttle is already earning positive feedback from test subjects, according to Foster.

“When they get a chance to ride, they say it’s like something at Disney World. It’s just so smooth,” he said.

If funding comes through for a pilot program, there’s a plan to test in New Jersey. For two years, Rutgers and NJ Transit will put three of the vehicles on the road at Fort Monmouth, not on regular streets around New Jersey. They plan to test them, vet them and see how well they perform.

Expo-goers posted one-word descriptions of it: “dangerous,” “innovative,” “futuristic.”

“I think it’s revolutionary,” said Total Transportation Corp’s corporate safety director Brandon Fox. “I think it would help our transportation needs very much with potential driver shortages.”

But, no steering wheel? No driver?

“I think it would be difficult for the consumer to swallow, but I think after the testing and proven testing, I think they would be able to trust the system and have it work in their best interest,” said Fox.

Jack Dean, program director of research and community services at NJ Transit, was left with a few questions about the vehicle.

“How is it controlled? How does it drive?” asked Dean. “And I think that’s the first important thing: safety. Is it safe to ride in? Is it safe to drive near? Is it safe to ride a bicycle around it? And so I think it really needs to prove itself, first and foremost, that it’s a safe technology, and build trust with the communities.”

Among the answers sought in the federally-funded research: How would the shuttle perform in New Jersey’s four-season weather?

“We’re using satellites as our main sensor system for finding ourselves. We’re not using cameras to look at lane lines. That can get covered up with snow or look for stop signs that can get knocked over,” said Foster. “So we wanted it to be as accurate and repeatable as possible. The fact that the LiDAR sensors are monitoring 360 degrees around the vehicle, sending out beams of light tens of thousands of times per second, they have a much better understanding of the environment than any human could. Even a team of humans wouldn’t be able to operate this safely.”

Foster says artificial intelligence makes autonomous vehicles safer because they react faster than humans, whose errors account for 93% of highway traffic deaths, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“We have some emergency stop buttons just in case anyone feels unsafe on the vehicle,” said Foster.

The autonomous shuttle is for short hauls on a campus, in a city, and around town – not the highway. NJ Transit envisions it as multi-use, including for seniors and those with disabilities, once it’s equipped for accessibility. The transit agency says after two years of testing, it will offer transportation companies the research results so they can decide whether to steer their fleet toward shuttles without steering wheels. __________________________________________________________________________________
If you liked this post you’ll love our daily newsletter, EnviroPolitics.
It’s packed with the latest news, commentary and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond.
Don’t take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

NJ Transit’s self-driving shuttle could revolutionize transportation in NJ Read More »