Jersey born and raised. I grew up in South Jersey, went to college in Central Jersey, and have lived in North Jersey for the last 11 years. New Jersey is not a state you hear people say they want to move to. For most people who live here, we spend our time figuring out how to leave.
I have done way more than my fair share of sitting in traffic on the Garden State Parkway, or standing on a packed train “experiencing 20 minute delays”. New Jersey is the most densely-populated state in the country. It’s interesting what a pandemic will do to a state, though. I don’t sit in traffic anymore. And I haven’t been on an NJ Transit train since March. COVID-19 solved the congestion problem and all the train delays in and out of New York City almost instantly.
Now I spend 23 hours a day inside my house or on my back porch. I gotta say I hope we never go back to the way things were. I was definitely not a fan of the hour-and-a-half commute each way and being smushed between two other humans. The pandemic has done a lot of bad, but there are definitely some bright spots as well.
