New Jersey towns, ring by ring

The towns

Scooter and e-bike columns are the share of surveyed ring points each vehicle legally reaches; the quiet column is the share of the e-bike’s quiet-preferring route that stays on the lowest-speed roads and paths. Compare a row against the statewide medians of 16%, 98% and 60%.

Only unambiguously-named municipalities are eligible — New Jersey repeats a dozen township names, and a page titled with a duplicate would name the wrong place. What is legal to ride is set by state rules, not by this survey; those are laid out on the New Jersey rules page.

How a town qualifies

A page is only worth publishing if the survey has something to say about that town, so eligibility is a data test rather than a keyword list. A municipality qualifies when its name is unique statewide, all three lenses returned a composite, and — at every ring — at least 6 of the 12 points landed on a road on both networks and were routed by the quiet lens. 419 of the 563 municipalities clear that bar. Town size is deliberately not part of it: several of the towns that ride best in this state are small boroughs, and a size test would cut exactly them.

From that pool the pilot fills fixed slots: 6 towns each for the highest and lowest scooter reach, the highest and lowest quiet share, the largest gain from riding an e-bike instead, the most populous towns on the state’s largest connected legal network, and — last — the towns that stand out furthest from their own surroundings. Any places those slots leave go first to the largest town of each county not yet represented, and then to the most populous towns still unpicked, until the set reaches 46. Ties break by population and then name, so the same committed data always produces the same list.

Standing out from its surroundings is the one slot that does not compare a town with the whole state. For each town it takes every eligible municipality whose centre lies within 20 miles, including the town itself, finds the median scooter reach across that neighbourhood, and ranks by how far the town’s own reach sits above it. A place can be middling statewide and still be the one town for miles with a connected low-speed network around it — which is exactly the page someone looking at a region wants, and no ranking against the state will surface it.

Size re-enters as a slot rule rather than a gate. The four standout places — best scooter reach, best quiet share, biggest e-bike gain, biggest lead over the surrounding towns — go to the leading town in the state at that measure at any size. Every other slot asks for a 2020 population of at least 10,000, which 202 of the eligible municipalities meet: those slots are population arguments to begin with, or they exist to show the bottom of the range honestly, and a few-hundred-person hamlet with nothing around it belongs in neither.

Questions about these pages

What the set is, how it was picked, and what the columns mean.

Which New Jersey towns have a page here?

46 of them, across 19 counties — the first set, not the whole state. They were picked by rule from the 419 municipalities whose survey rings are dense enough to say something real: every ring had at least 6 of its 12 points land on a road on both networks. More towns follow as that pool is worked through.

How were the towns chosen?

By ranking, not by hand. From the eligible pool the set takes the 6 highest and 6 lowest towns for low-speed-scooter reach, the same for quiet-route share, the 6 with the largest gain from riding an e-bike instead, the 6 most populous towns on the state's largest connected legal network, and last the 6 that stand out furthest from their own surroundings — each town's scooter reach measured against the median of every eligible municipality with a centre inside 20 miles of its own. Any places those slots leave go first to the largest town of each county not yet represented, and then to the most populous towns still unpicked. The standout places — best scooter reach, best quiet share, biggest e-bike gain, biggest lead over the surrounding towns — go to the best town in the state at that measure whatever its size, because a small borough that rides well is the most useful page this survey can produce. The rest of the slots ask for a population of at least 10,000: they are population arguments, or they exist to show the bottom of the range honestly, and a few-hundred-person hamlet belongs in neither. Ties break by population, so the rule is reproducible from the committed data.

What do the three columns mean?

Scooter and e-bike are ring reach: stand at the town centre, drop 12 evenly spaced points on rings 2, 5 and 10 miles out, and count the share that vehicle can legally reach. Quiet route is different — it routes an e-bike to each of those points preferring the lowest-speed roads and paths, then measures the share of the route's miles that stay on them. Statewide the medians are 16%, 98% and 60%.

Is my town coming?

Probably, if its rings are well covered by the road survey. This is a pilot: the pages are generated from a committed statewide snapshot, so extending the set is a matter of publishing more of the pool rather than collecting new data. The live map already covers every town in the state, whether or not it has a page here.

Where the numbers come from

Every value on these pages is decoded from the same committed survey that drives the dead-zone atlas. It is a frozen, reproducible snapshot — it does not update in real time, and it measures legality and low-speed routing only, never road condition or scenery.

metric versions

ring-survey/v1.0 · ring-survey-ebike/v1.0 · ride-quality-ebike/v1.0

data commit

git 667ac17

road topology

OSM/Geofabrik 2026-07-23T20:22:05.000Z

boundaries + population

NJGIN last edit 2025-03-11T13:59:09.223Z; retrieved 2026-07-21