NY/NJ truck planning-time index

Road congestion around NY/NJ: the FHWA truck planning-time index, a proxy for drayage conditions, not terminal turn time. Monthly.

Data through May 2026 · page updated Jul 10, 2026

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The truck planning-time index around NY/NJ is 3.82 as of May 2026 (FHWA, via BTS; 1.0 is free-flow). The Dwell. https://the-dwell.com/pti/new-york-new-jersey

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  <img src="https://the-dwell.com/charts/pti/new-york-new-jersey/chart.png" alt="Truck planning-time index, NY/NJ — May 1, 2026" width="720" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;border:0"/>
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<p style="font-size:12px;margin:4px 0 0">Source: <a href="https://the-dwell.com/pti/new-york-new-jersey?utm_source=embed&utm_medium=credit">The Dwell</a> · updates automatically</p>

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The NY/NJ truck planning-time index is 3.82 as of May 2026, near its trailing-12-month normal of 3.97. This is road congestion around the complex, a proxy for drayage conditions, not the terminal turn time a driver clocks gate to gate. The planning-time index is the ratio of a near-worst-case trip time to free-flow around the port, so a higher number means a wider window a drayage trip has to plan for. The FHWA publishes the planning-time index about two months behind, so May 2026 is the latest reading, not the current week.

Period moves and the seasonal vs-N-yr median (a prior-years comparison). The card verdict and the friction board use each series' trailing-12-month median, the friction rule.
Period	Current	Prior	Change
Month over month	3.82	3.69	+3.5%
Year over year	3.82	4.18	-8.6%
vs 5-yr median	3.82	3.96	-3.5%

About NY/NJ truck planning-time index

The truck planning-time index around NY/NJ measures how much longer a drayage trip near the terminals takes relative to free-flow conditions, published monthly by the FHWA. It is a road-congestion signal around the complex, a proxy for dray conditions: it says nothing about ships or boxes, and it is not the terminal truck turn time, the gate-to-gate minutes a driver actually spends inside the terminal that drayage and BCO readers quote. Turn times are the number the harbor trucking trade watches most, but HTA and PMSA publish them as monthly write-ups rather than a clean public data feed, so we do not carry them and use the FHWA planning-time index as the public, consistent proxy instead. A value of 1.0 would be free-flow; the numbers here are the buffer a trucker has to plan for. The FHWA releases it about two months after the month it covers, so the reading here is always the latest month available rather than a live figure.

About NY/NJ truck planning-time index

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