Of course, many places have a traditional core with car-oriented development along the edges. Within basically the same place, they’re two incredibly contrasting corridors. What’s more, highways 22 and 28 run parallel and very close to each other, at times less than a mile apart north–south. Bits and pieces of these two landscapes come and go and get remade, but nothing in the last 60-odd years has really changed their fundamental characters. Some modern apartment buildings are going up amid smaller, older neighbors along 28. The giant Channel Lumber man no longer lights up 22, and a small amusement park, first opened in the 1940s, recently gave up the ghost and became a modern apartment complex.
Along 22, things are larger and more spread out, with a handful of mid-century roadside buildings still intact. The development along 28 is small to medium in scale and fine-grained, and the road itself is no more than two lanes at many stretches. (An outpost of a regional electronics chain, one of the last of its kind, inhabits the third ship-shaped building to stand on a tenuous strip of commercial land, islanded by 22’s east- and west-bound lanes.)
22, which by the 1960s was already known as a premier example of American commercial roadside development, in all its neon-lit, exaggerated-modern glory. I’m talking about New Jersey Route 28, a state highway that tracks a NJ Transit line and which serves as Main Street for over a dozen small towns and cities and U.S. But the two I’m interested in here involve long drives, and they give you a chance to observe two very different approaches to land use and transportation. One is NJ Transit’s Raritan Valley rail line, and one is Interstate 78. If you want to get to Newark or New York City from central New Jersey, you have two options. The drive into Newark, Jersey, shows you two very different approaches to land use and transportation
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