Recalculating...

New Jersey drivers are angry, impatient, and rude. Honestly, I don't blame them. Driving is a pain in the ass here.

First, let's define a New Jersey road. I've driven on nicer cow paths. Jersey roads resemble the face of a 13-year-old boy: pockmarked, cracked, and riddled with oil, dirt, and shame. I realize that there is a much greater volume of traffic here than you might find in the south and thus, the roads deteriorate faster.

The problem, however, is many of these pot holes will never get fixed and instead continue to grow in size until they swallow a Lincoln Navigator on its way to stare at Springsteen's shore house in Seaside. THis isn't a shot at the hard working people of NJDOT. Those guys are doing the best they can. But they're outnumbered 6 Billion to 1. However, I digress...

New Jersey's road system had to have been designed by a 3 year old with a broken Etch-a-Sketch. They say the quickest way between two points in a straight line. There's no such thing here, instead. We have the jughandle.

What's a jughandle? Why it's the most backwards way to turn left EVER! Instead of going left, you go to the right! Think of it as an interstate off ramp at nearly every turn.



Often, the jughandle is on the opposite side of the cross street from you. That means in order to turn left. You must wait for the light, drive straight through the intersection, immediately exit to the right and then...WAIT FOR THE SAME LIGHT AGAIN, ON THE STREET YOU JUST CROSSED!

If the point of a jughandle is to speed up the flow of traffic then how is that accomplished by increasing the amount time a car will spend navigating a single intersection?

There are a few places where making a normal left hand turn is possible. But driver beware, you will never have the right away due to the constant stream of traffic driving past you. You’ll probably end up making that left just as the light turns red.

And because you made that last second dash to the left, someone will probably HONK and yell at you for making them wait 3/10TH of a nanosecond. For God's sake, don't bother giving them the finger…that's how we say hello in New Jersey...

By the way, don't bother using your GPS. It won't help. Honestly, the good people at Garmin and TomTom etc. should just remove New Jersey maps from their GPS models and replace them with a little flashing message that simply says: "You're F$%#ed. Welcome to the Garden State"