Illustration: Leonard Beard
New Jersey is the fourth smallest state. Only Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut are smaller. Even Hawaii, with all its islands, is larger. Despite its size, of the 50 states, New Jersey has the most roads per square mile and the most cars per capita—as anyone who’s driven on the Turnpike probably could have guessed. Having many highways and drivers is understandable, given that our state is the most densely populated and suburban housing is so spread out.
Given New Jersey’s car-dominated culture, it’s heartening that we’ve applied our inventiveness to our roads, with the (in)famous jughandle and the less-talked-about Jersey barrier, which consists of dividers between highway lanes and traffic moving in opposite directions, making head-on collisions virtually impossible.
Unlike Jersey barriers, which can be found in various parts of the country, jughandles are located almost nowhere else in the United States or the world. I asked a friend from Texas why I had seen no jughandles in his state. He answered with a laugh, “It’s because we’re not crazy like New Jerseyans. We don’t make right turns in order to make lefts. We just make lefts.”
My friend did acknowledge, despite his joke, that jughandles offer safety. However, he insisted that an extra interior lane with a green arrow at an intersection could be just as effective a safety feature as a jughandle for making a left or U-turn.
New Jersey has plenty of those as well. But it can be difficult to make space for one where it does not already exist, whereas a jughandle can be added on the right almost anywhere.
The earliest jughandle on record was constructed in 1959 on Route 46 in Montville, though history has not assigned the honor of its mention to any specific individual.
The Jersey barrier, meanwhile, was developed at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken in the early 1950s. It has saved countless lives here and elsewhere. Barriers are now found on highways throughout the world, but most people have no idea what they’re called. This is also true of most Americans and even most New Jerseyans, who don’t know that those dividers are called Jersey barriers or that New Jersey deserves credit for inventing them.
Recently, in Spain, I asked a police officer at a rest stop what the dividers on the nearby highway were called. “Chersey barrios,” he responded. He had never heard of New Jersey and did not connect “Chersey” with the place. “Is that how you say New York?” he asked me.
I have had similar experiences during my travels in many countries in Europe, Asia and South America.
Usually, Jersey barriers are made of concrete. At first, using prepared forms, a barrier’s sections were poured on-site. Now, the sections are often fabricated elsewhere and trucked to the site, where they are joined for miles, often using steel reinforcing rods that extend through the barriers to tie sections together.
For a temporary division of highways, usually at construction sites, hollow plastic barriers are employed, which are filled with water to make them almost as heavy and immovable as the permanent concrete barriers that will replace them. The water is drained before they are removed.
The fact that New Jersey cleverly created both barriers and jughandles says a lot about the inventiveness of the state; the spirit of Thomas Edison is still alive.
But while New Jersey roads are generally to be celebrated, when they’re bad, they’re among the worst.
This is nowhere more apparent than on the eastern section of Route 22, which is known by various unattractive names, most prominently, Death Highway. For several hundred yards, principally in the Union Township area, the median between the west- and east-bound lanes of the divided highway, which farther west consists of all grass and trees, here contains commercial establishments. One can only enter and leave the median using the fast lane, a dangerous proposition. There are lots of rear-end collisions.
Don’t I know? A car speeding along in the fast lane, with no plans to enter the commercial median (I had no such plans either), smashed into my back end, knocking me forward into another car that was slowly entering the median. Luckily, no one was hurt, but my car became half as long as it had been a minute before, both ends squashed.
The driver who may have been responsible for the accident, if anyone was, screamed at me, “How can you slow down in the fast lane?” I yelled the same words at the driver of the first car of the three.
Of course, none of us was really to blame. It was the idiotic design of the road we were on, as stupid as the Jersey barriers and jughandles were brilliant.
Almost as bad are the miniuscule turnarounds in the median on that part of Route 22. Like the commercial median strip, one can enter and depart the turnarounds only via the fast lanes. If there were ever a place jughandles might save lives, it would be on this part of Route 22.
On August 2, 1973, a deadly problem occurred in that area, ironically caused by otherwise helpful Jersey barriers. That day, a torrential, 7-inch downpour fell in just over four hours. Worse, the rain caused a reservoir atop the Watchung Mountains, which run along the westbound lanes of Route 22, to burst, and all that water charged down the hill to a low area on Route 22. The water’s ability to flow into the Raritan River was impeded by the concrete barriers. Six people died, most drowning in their cars or swept away by the deluge. Hard to believe that people could drown on a highway, but the water came so quickly, there was no time or means to escape.
On this and other vulnerable stretches of Route 22, there are now wide slits at the bottom of the concrete barriers, through which rushing water can pass to the other side of the highway and beyond.
Despite this disaster, the Jersey barrier and the state’s jughandles have, in the main, saved lives and are things we can be proud of. But do stay off certain sections of Route 22 when it’s raining.
Michael Aaron Rockland is professor emeritus of American studies at Rutgers University and the author of numerous books, the most recent being The Other Jersey Shore: Life on the Delaware River.
[RELATED: A Crash Course in the Joys of Jersey Authenticity]
No one knows New Jersey like we do. Sign up for one of our free newsletters here. Want a print magazine mailed to you? Purchase an issue from our online store.