New Jerseyites and the Car: A Relationship Stuck in Overdrive

His first meeting out of the way, Gio Bussanich stretches out and settles into his favorite chair with a cup of coffee and the morning paper.

That Bussanich is lounging in the driver’s seat of his red Chevrolet Lumina raises no eyebrows. A dozen other travelers at the Vince Lombardi service area off the New Jersey Turnpike are doing the same, happily ignoring the benches, picnic tables and indoor restaurants.

They prefer to stay in their parked cars on this unusually warm and sunny day, eating, chatting on cell phones, reading, sleeping.

On each side of their little corner of heaven lie the main arteries of the New Jersey megalopolis--multiple lanes of turnpike traffic zooming to New York and points north, more lanes pouring southward to Philadelphia and beyond.

But on the grassy island in between, “It’s my piece of the world,” says Bussanich. “You’re like in your bubble here.”

A 46-year-old seller of hydraulic parts, he drives 500 miles a week and doesn’t get out of his car unless he has to.

New Jerseyites LOVE their cars. They take exquisite care of them, buying high-tech stereos, televisions and other accessories that offer some of the comforts of home. They rarely park for fast food; they’d rather drive through. Gas is cheap here, and they don’t have to pump it. People may think of California as the ultimate car culture, but New Jersey is the state that gave the world the drive-in movie theater and the cloverleaf interchange.

So accustomed are New Jerseyites to the driver’s seat that few distances are too short to drive.

“If I have to go across the street, I do walk,” says Pierre Chidiak, a bagel-shop owner from Wayne. “But if I have to go a block and a half, I’ll take my car.”

New Jerseyites HATE their cars. They pay the nation’s highest auto insurance rates to drive in the nation’s thickest traffic. Drivers are intimately familiar with honking, tailgating and vulgar gestures, with terms like road rage, HOV and EZ Pass.

In New Jersey, cars outnumber drivers; there are 6.4 million registered cars for 5.8 million licensed drivers.

Every year, 2.6 million cars travel on every mile of every lane of every road in New Jersey, according to a study by the nonprofit Road Information Program. That’s 72% above the national average. New Jersey, already crowded with more people per square mile than any other state, is equally crowded with cars.

More are coming. By 2010, highway travel in New Jersey will be up 18%, the study says.

Traffic and the inability to cope without a car have made driving “a bigger quality-of-life issue,” says John Tiene, executive director of the Insurance Council of New Jersey, an industry group. “Driving has become so much more stressful.”

So stressful that the state psychological association has its own task force dedicated to angry driving. So stressful that a recent newspaper poll, dubbed the “Middle Finger Index,” tried to quantify the prevalence of that vulgar gesture on the roads.

Much of the rage was fomented by the HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes that tried to put New Jerseyites in a sharing frame of mind. The highway lanes were set aside for car pools and entitled the state to more federal road funding. But they never caught on.

In November, New Jersey scored another first: First state to abolish HOV lanes without having to refund the federal aid. No longer did drivers have to sit seething in a standstill while lone cars sailed by in the HOV lanes. No wonder the rejoicing seemed more appropriate to the lifting of a siege. One newspaper celebrated by hiring a Dixieland band to play at a highway rest stop.

“No more government-designed traffic jams on Routes 80 and 287!” declared U.S. Rep. Marge Roukema (R-Ridgewood).

If HOV lanes were the stuff of political battles, so were those sky-high auto insurance rates, averaging $1,099 a year and sometimes rising to $4,000, which threatened to derail Gov. Christie Whitman’s reelection in 1997.

And when Whitman proposed to raise the gasoline tax by 2 cents a gallon to protect undeveloped land, lawmakers of both parties shot it down, fearing public outcry.

“Yeah, I’d like to preserve open spaces, but I’m a motorist,” says Pamela Fischer, spokeswoman for the AAA’s New Jersey chapter, one of many groups and lawmakers who opposed gas money going to anything other than transportation.

So New Jerseyites can continue to tank up on regular unleaded for 90 cents a gallon--or as little as 75 cents in some places.

But it’s getting harder to find a quiet corner of unspoiled countryside in the nation’s most densely populated state, jammed between Philadelphia and New York and serving as a major corridor for the nation’s East Coast traffic.

The traffic gets better the farther one gets from the suburbs of those two cities. Off the most heavily traveled roads, people can still enjoy the state parks, beaches, mountains and farmland that gave New Jersey the title of Garden State.

To keep the air clean, lawmakers toughened the state’s emissions test last year, but tried to appease motorists by scheduling it every two years instead of one. The complicated new timetable only confused things, however.

Listeners who called New Jersey 101.5 talk radio begged for guidance. When do cars made in an odd-numbered year get inspected? What color sticker? When do the tests get tougher?

“Frankly, we don’t know what to tell them,” radio host Jeff Deminski says. “It turns into kind of a farce.”

The roads themselves don’t help ease tempers. Road signs are often faded, misleading or downright baffling, as anyone trying to reach Newark International Airport from the heavily traveled Garden State Parkway can attest. The overused roads on major shopping routes often have lanes closed for repairs.

“Route 22 is a nightmare. Route 46 is a nightmare. Route 17 is a nightmare,” says Victor Friedman of Saddle River. “I have rage.”

It only takes one accident to trigger chaos. On the day after Christmas a truck flipped on a commercial strip of Route 46, stalling cars for 10 miles on one of the busiest shopping days of the year and giving new meaning to what New Jerseyites call mall-to-mall traffic.

The pavement is black with skid marks where Routes 4 and 17 converge, squeezing three lanes into two, and four lines of cars slow to a crawl so drivers won’t miss their turnoff and have to drive another 30 minutes to make a U-turn.

“The worst cloverleaf I’ve seen any place in the world,” says Howard Goldman, a manager at a computer store near the intersection.

So why does he drive? After all, buses go to Paramus.

Because cars are more convenient. Many of the nearly 360,000 daily commuters on New Jersey Transit buses and trains have to drive to their stop anyway, and then find a parking place.

In the Union County suburb of Westfield, Mayor Tom Jardim says, the railroad station’s 470-car parking lot has a four-year waiting list.

“Some people drive to other towns where the parking is easier,” Jardim says. “Some people decide that they’re just going to drive. Other people actually change jobs.”

Futile Fight Against Car Culture

NJ Transit ridership has risen every year, especially on the new Midtown Direct rail line linking Essex, Morris, Union and Warren counties directly to New York. More than $1 billion is invested in train concourses for Newark and New York’s Penn Station, two more rail lines with direct service into New York, and a Hudson River light rail line, spokesman Steve Coleman said.

But mass transit can’t compete with cars in a state that is really a loose agglomeration of suburbs, Coleman acknowledged.

“The jobs are so dispersed that I don’t think there’s any way we can ever serve every single person,” he said.

Even if the trains ran twice as often, many New Jerseyites say, they wouldn’t dream of giving up cars.

Bussanich wants to control his schedule, saying buses and trains are less reliable than the road, even in traffic. “You just feel so secure in your car.”

Michael Rockland, a Rutgers professor of American studies who has written a book about the New Jersey Turnpike, says the dependence is dangerous. The car as bubble isolates people from their neighbors, making them identify more with the road than their hometowns. Among the many stereotypes New Jerseyites must endure is the joke that when asked for their address, they give their exit number.

“How many towns in New Jersey have a vital center?” says Rockland. “The reason why people love their cars is they don’t have neighborhoods. They don’t have communities. If they did, they would much rather sit on a park bench.”

But in New Jersey, it’s so easy to stay in the car. Ray Saadeh’s Car Toys in Union will install not just your car stereo, but TV screens on the back of each seat.

Many people have two cars. Ron Spethmann has three: a Chrysler minivan for family trips, a 1998 Jeep Wrangler for work and a 1995 Chrysler Concorde for . . . for extra.

He is 30 and says he has never ridden a bus or train, “never had the need.”

A precious few rebels abandon cars on principle. John Bergan, a pedestrian advocate, walks around his hometown of Princeton, takes the train elsewhere and brags about being a rich man.

“I’m buying furniture while everyone else is paying tolls,” he says.

Rockland, an urban adventurer, has walked the length of Broadway in Manhattan and bicycled all of Route 1 in New Jersey. He eschews malls and all places drivable, and shops exclusively in the center of Morristown, three blocks from his home.

“I want to go to the bank, I walk to the bank,” he says. “It’s such a warm and fuzzy experience just to be able to walk somewhere.”

But even Rockland can’t get away from cars. He drives his 1992 Honda to work every day, 32 miles from Morristown to New Brunswick. Says he can’t get there any other way.

He says parking is a nightmare.