New Jersey – The Map Room

The NJ Transit App Is Apparently Terrible

Published on 2 February 20242 February 2024 by Jonathan Crowe

The Verge’s Victoria Song moved from New York City to New Jersey and discovered the awfulness of the NJ Transit app.

Many of my friends who’d migrated to Jersey warned me about the NJ Transit app. It’s not good, they said. I didn’t take them too seriously. I was forged in the fires of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s continually broken website circa 2001. After a seven-year stint in Tokyo navigating the labyrinthian Tokyo subway and bus system, what public transit app could ever befuddle me?

Hubris is a bitch.

(It’s reportedly okay for trains; the bus—which is what she’s taking—seems to be Another Matter.)

An Update on Leonia, NJ’s War on Waze

Published on 20 April 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

Leonia, New Jersey’s decision to close its residential streets to non-residents (previously)—an attempt to deal with the traffic being routed that way by navigation apps like Waze—has also, like the apps that created the problem in the first place, resulted in some unintended consequences. On, for example, visiting relatives and local businesses.

Previously: New Jersey Borough to Close Streets to Congestion-Rerouted Traffic.

New Jersey Borough to Close Streets to Congestion-Rerouted Traffic

Published on 2 January 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

When your navigation app (e.g. Waze) suggests an alternate route to avoid congestion, that has knock-on effects on the communities you’re routed through, particularly when a lot of traffic gets pushed onto quiet residential streets. That’s the situation in Leonia, New Jersey, the New York Times reports, where later this month the police will be closing some 60 streets to non-local traffic in hopes of routing all that Wazer traffic somewhere else. Some of the somewhere elses aren’t happy with this move, naturally. [Engadget]

Map of Colonial New Jersey Rediscovered

Published on 6 January 20167 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

A 1769 map of New Jersey by the famed colonial surveyor Bernard Ratzer, commissioned to settle a longstanding border dispute between New Jersey and New York, has been uncovered by a Harvard University librarian. The map, criss-crossed by competing and alternate boundary lines, has been digitized and is available to view online as part of Harvard’s Colonial North American project.