Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Homework Helper
Gold Member
- 7,232
- 66
I think I hit this circle last summer while driving from Allentown to Princeton (Seemed like there were no roads connecting these two places!)
Of course, I was alone, in strange country (If you east coasters think Jersey is strange... I was born, raised and live in the back woods of Oregon! Yes we have pavement!) relying on The Hertz GPS system... I took me a couple of tries but I made it! What a nightmare.. Oh yeah this was at about 4:00 on a weekday afternoon.
BTW: Just checked the map... the circle I encountered was not in North Brunswick, the first time I drove to Princeton I came in from the north off of 78, I followed the GPS, so I am not sure how I got there! Later trips were from the PA turnpike through Philly then on 95 and 1. No circles on the that route.
I think there's still a circle or two on 70 (S.R., not Interstate), but if you wound up there, your GPS was taking you pretty far off-track. I've never driven to Princeton from 78, so not sure what you encounter that way. Were you coming down 206? There are some weird spots on that. I can't recall if there are circles, but there are some places where they seem to have a string of weird merges and zigzags as they connected roads in what seemed like an afterthought of the construction process. Actually, that's not uncommon with NJ roads. I grew up just off Rt 18, which used to be a fairly short highway. The basically built the middle, then ran into problems with people unwilling to sell their property or have a highway running past their backyards, so couldn't extend it north to connect to anything, and either didn't consider connecting it further south or ran out of funds for it, so you'd get about halfway to where you were going, than have to take a random zig-zag of roads to get to the Parkway or an interstate. They've since extended it considerably further south so you can take it directly to the Parkway (it wouldn't surprise me if Trump and the other Atlantic City casino owners had something to do with this to make it easier to head to the shore), and are still in the middle of digging up half the Rutgers campus to extend the northern section directly to I-287 (the other half of the homeowners in that area started protesting because their little "historic" road was being trampled by tractor trailers having to drive about 5 miles along this one-lane winding road to get from one major highway to another, which made neither homeowners nor trucking companies happy -- in the end, I think trucking companies have more pull than homeowners for getting construction pushed through).