>Driving to NYC has improved tremendously in just the past few weeks.
>The new lanes on the NJ turnpike have opened and the bottleneck at Exit 8 - Cranbury has disappeared.
>I got from Midtown to Hamilton in 1.5 hrs in the rush hour.
>It was election day, so that is not typical but things have improved a lot.

So you too get the pre-election roadworks? And they actually improve things? Now that's different.

Here we had pre-election roadwork in 1996 (Sloba lost big time then, but in the run-up he didn't know that yet, so he invested a lot of paid effort and our money in this)... the streets in my local community, end-of-town, were unpaved for the last kilometer, and the sidestreets as well. They came and paved at least half of them to the width of one truck - so if two cars were to pass each other, they had to dip their right wheels in the mud.

Nowadays, this is being fixed. One of those narrowly paved streets was announced as being widened and bla bla bla... and it was, for about 50cm, and it got a nice white curbstone to it, nice - except it was done only for the first block of that street. The remaining three remained as they were. Perhaps for some future elections.