Why New Jersey Hates Cars
By D. J. DiBiase
First off, let
me state that although I am not a native New Jerseyian, in the 16 years I have
lived here, I have come to enjoy it. (New Jersey
is really more a state of mind than an actual physical place, although if you
look at page 66 of my 2006 Rand-McNally atlas, you will indeed see a multicolored
picture of a state claiming to be New
Jersey.) But I digress.
The roads are
not designed for cars in New Jersey.
Have you heard of jughandles? No, those are not the protruding lumps of flab
that stick out from your side, and I’m not talking ears. Jughandles are the way
you turn left by going right in New
Jersey. In other words, to make a left-hand turn, you
must bear to the right on a curving road where you will just miss the green
light to cross and therefore have to wait 10 minutes for it to change back to
green.
Not a difficult
concept to understand, and not a bad idea. The problem is that frequently,
there are no jughandles and to turn left, you actually must ‘turn left’! This
maddening lack of consistency causes you to have to straddle several lanes of
traffic as you approach an intersection, until it becomes clear where you must
go – whether to dart right to use a jughandle or shoot left to get into a
left-turn lane. This causes many two-lane roads to become one-lane roads as
drivers straddle both lanes in an attempt to keep their options open. Of
course, if by some chance you cannot dart over to the right to use the
jughandle and decide, ‘No biggie, I’ll just take the jughandle at the next
intersection’, well, of course, the next intersection will have a left-turn
lane which you will miss because you’re in the right-hand lane (behind a
straddler) so you can get to the jughandle which isn’t there…. This could continue
until you reach Bergen County or Delaware,
depending upon your direction of travel.
Of course, you
won’t know that you’re in Bergen County or Delaware
because the signs indicating your location are probably faded to the point of
obscurity. When I moved into the state, I wondered for months why they went to
the trouble of hanging these large greenish-whitish boards next to the
stoplights or on poles at intersections. Then a native told me they were the faded
street signs. Oh.
Speaking of
signs, New Jersey
has a system of secondary roads that are maintained by each separate county (21
of them in NJ). These roads are marked by highly-visible dark blue signs with Gulden’s
mustard-colored lettering, and they are approximately 12 inches by 12 inches in
size and generally behind overgrown roadside vegetation. The Route numbers
generally don’t show up on popular navigation sites such as MapQuest or Google
Maps. The roads occasionally change route numbers when you cross a county line,
and are more generally known by their street names (which also change). So, if
you’re driving on Route 613 in Monroe, it will also be known more commonly as
Spotswood-Englishtown Road in Spotswood or Devoe Avenue (also in Spotswood),
depending on where you are. If you’re driving through Jamesburg and take a left
onto County Route 612, it starts as Pergola and ends a few miles later as
Matchaponix. Yet no one refers to it as Route 612! And while Beach Avenue in Cape
May maintains it’s name on it’s entire length, because it is interrupted
by erosion in the center, the part to the east is called West Beach Ave,
while the part to the west is called plain old Beach Ave.
One of the
major north-south roads in New Jersey
is the Garden State Parkway.
Being a Parkway, it is cars-only, no trucks. Umm, except for coach buses, which
apparently are cars and not trucks. Except that they are extremely wide and the
lanes on the GSP are slightly narrower than the norm (and your average
full-size pick-up truck). Also, there are numerous bridges crossing the GSP,
many of them an attractive stone-arched design. Of course, the height of the
archway is tallest in the middle, so you can be cruising down the middle lane
of the GSP at a leisurely 75, being passed like you’re standing still, when a
bus blows by you. If you’re approaching one of these bridges, you need to
immediately slow down as the bus will slew into your middle lane to ensure it
will clear the bridge. Since you’re struggling to just stay in your lane
because of the wake turbulence generated by the bus, it’s usually not an issue.
It is
apparently a statute that all new developments in New Jersey have curbs made from Belgian
block, which is a rough squared-off stone intended to decorate the side of the
road and provide multiple, daily opportunities to shred tires and wheels. No
other area I have lived in has as much of this miserable stuff. Having
personally holed a tire when parking (albeit badly) at a doctor’s office, I can
attest for the dangers inherent in Belgian block curbing. All four of the
wheels on my Audi are marked, to various degrees, by their encounters with the
curbs around the state. Because they even use it at the end of the driveway, I
have a 3-inch lip that I have to negotiate just to park in my driveway (which I
generally do looking over my shoulder to see if the neighborhood teens are
screaming around the corner in their riced-up Civics as I inch my way over the
lip).
Have you ever
gassed-up in New Jersey?
No, I’m not talking about the late, great Dayton Diner but our filling station
industry. You know, the ones where you’re never allowed to pump your own gas? Admittedly,
when it’s 10 degrees and the wind is howling, it’s certainly a benefit. But
mostly it’s a curse to those of us that don’t like the sides of our cars stained
and paint peeling from overflows and drips of gasoline from ham-handed pump
jockeys. Or asking for premium and getting a tank full of regular rot-gut and
having to live with the mistake through 350 rough-running miles. Or wondering
why exactly they need your credit card when they start pumping, if not to run
off 73 copies of illegal cards now sporting your credit card number.
One of the
most exciting aspects of driving in New
Jersey is the new driver’s road test. This is done on
a road course set up next to specific Motor Vehicle Commission offices. The
potential driver gets to navigate this road course with an evaluator sitting in
the passenger’s seat, while the parent paces up and down on the walkway outside
the test building, watching this process proceed, muttering under his breath
‘Use your blinker, use your blinker!’ ‘Slow down!’ Look both ways at the stop
sign!’ And finally, the parallel parking! ‘Cut the wheel! Cut the wheel! Now
the other way! No! NO! Too sharp an angle! Arghhh!’ I’m sure they have a
defibrillator on site.
New Jersey is a wonderful place to live and
visit, as long as you don’t have to drive here.
