Planned Route 55 bike ban could affect Cumberland County riders

State transportation officials planned to ban bicycles from the full 40.5-mile Route 55 corridor, a change that would hit Cumberland County riders who have used the highway to move between Vineland, Millville and other parts of South Jersey.

The current traffic regulation order allowing bicycles on Route 55 dates to July 3, 1995. The proposed ban would cover the entire four-lane highway as it runs through Cumberland, Salem and Gloucester counties, a stretch that has long served as a commuter route linking southern New Jersey to Glassboro and the Philadelphia-Camden metropolitan area.

That matters because Route 55 is not a side road. It is a major high-speed corridor built for freeway traffic, and the state has now moved toward treating it that way for cyclists as well. For people who ride because they cannot afford a car, the change is less about a traffic rule than about access. A direct route they may have relied on for work trips, shopping or getting across the county would no longer be available.

NJDOT’s bicycle materials help explain the broader policy shift. The department’s Southern New Jersey bicycle map says interstate roadways are generally closed to bicyclists unless special permission is issued. At the same time, NJDOT’s statewide bicycle planning materials say the agency supports bicycling as transportation and recreation. Route 55 sits at the point where those two ideas collide: encouraging bike travel while recognizing that some limited-access highways are not safe places to mix bicycles and freeway-speed traffic.

The practical question now is what comes next for riders who used Route 55. The ban would not create a replacement corridor through Cumberland County. It would push cyclists onto other roads, where conditions vary widely and the safest option may not be the most direct one. In a county shaped by farms, suburbs and business districts, that could mean longer trips and more time on roads that were never built to function like a freeway link.

For Cumberland County, the proposal is both a safety decision and a mobility decision. It would formalize a long-standing concern about bicycles on a highway designed for fast traffic, while also narrowing one of the few direct cross-county connections that some residents have used to get around South Jersey.