If you’re looking for a thrill ride — with the possibility of actual physical deconstruction as an added attraction — I say you skip Great Adventure this summer and do something both terrifying and free:
Get off the New Jersey Turnpike at Exit 9 in East Brunswick and try to make it down Route 18 north to the exit for Route 1 south with your life and automobile intact. The first week I moved to New Jersey, my new boss warned me about what he called “Dysfunction Junction,” and said that if I wanted to maintain my health, I should avoid that awful traffic area at all costs. “It’s like bumper cars at the carnival, with potential loss of life and limb as a bonus.”
I didn’t believe him, of course. I’d just moved from Massachusetts, home to some of the rudest and most aggressive drivers in the United States, and where the motto is “Run ’em all down and let God sort ’em out.” In the Bay State, it’s not uncommon to see an old couple behind the wheel with an AARP sticker on the back window and about a half dozen little auto decals on the front fender with X’s through them, like pilots used to tally their kills during World War II. OK, I made that up, but you get the point.
But the first time I drove through the Zone of Death on my own, I had to pull over in the Sears parking lot on Route 1 south after I had squeaked through and wait for about an hour until I quit hyperventilating. “They can’t be serious!” I told my wife that evening. “What kind of sick, sadistic idiot would design something like that? Someone whose ultimate goal is zero population growth? They’ve got to do something about that!”
That was 18 years ago, and if anything, it’s worse now than it was then because there’s more traffic.
Here’s what you have to do if you want to live: You start by going through the toll booth on the Pike, and if you’re in a lefthand lane, you’ve got to cut across the path of everyone else coming out of the toll booths to make the right-hand exit onto Route 18 north. Stay in the left-hand lane of the exit road, because if you don’t, you’ll be adding one more forced merge to the equation in just a few seconds. Once you merge onto Route 18 north, you’re faced with several immediate, critical and dangerous maneuvers. Within a short distance, the road splits, with the two right-hand lanes heading toward Route 1 north, and the two lefthand lanes continuing down Route 18 north and what the sign says is the exit to Route 1 south.
Since you’ve entered into the lanes feeding Route 1 north, however, that means you’ve got to cut across two lanes of traffic to merge into the two left-hand lanes. This presents about a zillion opportunities to make other drivers honk and shoot threefingered salutes, and an equal number of opportunities for collision. In this case, I think you’re really better off if traffic is heavy, because that makes people slow down. If traffic is light, and people are driving 50, it can get really interesting.
Once you’ve made those merging lane changes and are headed in the right direction on Route 18 north, stay in the right lane, but watch out for the string of cars merging from Route 18 south at just about that point. Most of them are just as tetchy as you are. But pay close attention, because not only do you have to keep them from slamming into you, you’ve got to merge into their lane almost immediately because the exit for Route 1 south is a poorly marked sharp right just around the corner. If you blink at that point, you’ll miss it entirely, and who knows where you’ll end up. Keep in mind that all of this happens in what seems like about a quarter of a mile.
It sounds confusing, I know, but just try it in person for the first time, and unless you’re on mood-stabilization medication, you’ll know what I mean about the hyperventilation.
Still, it’s impossible to avoid the Zone of Death entirely if you live in this area, especially if you occasionally use the Turnpike. And that’s why I was initially excited to hear about the TurnpikeAuthority’s plan for improvements on local roadways around Exit 9. The $26 million proposal, first introduced inMarch and reported again in last week’s edition of the East Brunswick Sentinel, would hopefully ease the problem by widening the Turnpike ramp on Route 18 north to two lanes and shifting the state highway 50 feet east. Among other things, a southbound lane would be added that would expand that stretch of Route 18 to five lanes through Naricon Place.
But I started to get that sinking feeling as I realized the plan does absolutely nothing to fix Dysfunction Junction. On account of early deadlines this week because of the holiday, I couldn’t catch up with East Brunswick Mayor David Stahl before deadline to ask him about all this, but I did get Greg Potkulski, the acting director of Planning & Engineering, on the phone, and he confirmed my worst fears.
“That’s been the opposition to this whole project from the beginning,” he said. The TurnpikeAuthority says it’s the Department of Transportation’s problem, and DOT says it knows there’s a problem, but there’s no funding. The mayor is still talking to both of them.”
And when might we reasonably expect a solution?
“I can’t even guess,” Potkulski said.
So there you have it, dear readers. If the Turnpike Authority’s proposal is approved and completed, we’ll have a much more safe, sane and efficient method of feeding the death trap.
That’s progress, right?
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].