For most New Jersey residents, driving is a quintessential part of daily life. Parents shuttle their children from activity to activity, teens anxiously await the day they can take their drivers test, and many use vehicles as part of their commute. Despite this, Jersey drivers are known for not always being the best behind the wheel. There are many valid reasons behind this perception, but I do not actually think we are that bad at driving. 

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As I alluded to earlier, it is a rite of passage for New Jersey teens to wake up bright and early on their 17th birthday and head to the Motor Vehicle Commission to take their road test (I for one got to skip a morning of school to take mine). A key complaint with the system employed by the state is that the test is not particularly difficult. It only involves knowing how to make left/right turns, come to a complete stop at a stop sign, parallel park, and drive in reverse. My test wasn’t even on the roads, rather it was on a closed course. The test is relatively easy to practice for, and does lead to many unqualified drivers obtaining a license. This opinion piece states that the first rule of driving in NJ should be “don’t assume anyone knows what they’re doing,” and I’m inclined to agree with them.

Those of us who learned to drive in New Jersey usually don’t think the state is filled with terrible drivers. However, many believe that we are not qualified behind the wheel because of our constant aggression towards other drivers. However, this is just something you have to learn when driving in the most densely populated state in the nation. With so many cars on the road at once, passivity is simply not an option. Everyday life in New Jersey involves a lot of hustle and bustle, and almost everyone is in a rush to get somewhere. A comment on this Quora thread from a few years ago does a good job of summing this up: “it’s not NJ drivers that suck, it’s the out of state drivers that don’t understand how roads work in our state that gum up the works and cause most problems.”

One popular display of this aggression is known as the “jersey slide.” This is when a driver crosses over several lanes at once just before they get off an exit, rather than waiting in line in the exit lane. I have also seen such a move done in reverse, where someone merges onto a highway and immediately cuts over to the far left lane. Speaking of the left lane, any New Jersey driver worth their salt knows one thing about the left lane: 20 over the speed limit is still too slow. Nothing is more infuriating to us than a car with out of state plates crawling along at 55 mph in the left lane.

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Driving in New Jersey is its own special skill, and takes a mix of both aggressive and defensive driving. Personally, I feel that by learning to drive in the state, I am aware of how aggressive I drive, and can predict that others will drive in the same manner. This self awareness is a common trait throughout the states, and makes our roads appear more dangerous than they are in reality.

One of New Jersey’s more obscure quirks involves a relatively mundane part of life: making a stop at the gas station. While in every other state (except Oregon,) drivers pump their own gas, we do things differently in New Jersey. Instead, we simply pull up to the pump, and sit in our cars while an attendant does all the work for us. The only thing we have to do is roll down our window, hand over a form of payment, and say what type of gas we would like, and how much money we would like to put in our tank. This practice leads to some interesting cultural norms, such as the phrase “Jersey girls don’t pump gas” being common on bumper stickers, and the common knowledge of what “20 regular cash” means – 20 dollars of regular gas – although that doesn’t get you much these days.

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When automobiles were first invented, full-service gas stations were the norm. As CNN Business discussed this past spring, gas stations made money in the first half of the twentieth century by having their attendants offer additional services while cars were fueled, such as windshield wiping and battery checks. Using concerns about safety hazards relating to self-service, stations lobbied for bans on the practice, and as of 1968 it was banned in 23 states. But when self-service became the norm in Europe and other countries, it slowly made its way to America. Realizing that the switch would allow them to cut costs and add new avenues to profit such as food and snacks, 80% of gas stations were self-service in 1990, compared to just 8% twenty years before.

When gas prices skyrocketed in the early stages of this year, some members of the New Jersey state legislature proposed removing the ban on self-service. A study conducted by Clemson University concluded that when Oregon relaxed its full-service requirements, gas prices dropped by 4.4 cents per gallon. In spite of this, a Rutgers poll from March of this year found that “73 percent of residents said they prefer having their gas pumped for them.” In a state that argues about a lot, getting 73% of the population to agree on an issue says something.

Finally, I would like to close with a comedic story from my own life, one that took place less then a month ago, just a few days before I moved to school. I drove up to visit a friend of mine at West Point in New York as he had been away in training all summer without his phone, so I hadn’t had a chance to see him. Having done quite a bit of driving in the days prior, my gas tank was perhaps lower than it should have been when I embarked on my hour-long drive. About 45 minutes in, my fuel light came on, and I decided to stop at the next gas station I found. As I pulled into the gas station, it hit me. I would have to pump my own gas. I got out of my car, and successfully opened the door to my gas cap. However, I couldn’t get the cap itself to unscrew. I was going in the direction of the arrows, but nothing was happening. So, I pulled my car off to the side and went into the gas station to use the bathroom. There, I decided to see if YouTube could offer any help. So there I was, sitting in a gas station bathroom, googling how to pump your own gas. I have never felt like more of a New Jerseyan. Ultimately I did figure it out, and my friend was able to capture this image:

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