I-78/NJ 139, Jersey City, NJ

I-78 comes in from the south and goes out to the east, NJ 139 comes in from the west, feeding into US 22 as one goes westward. US 1 and US 9 also have a presence here.

Northeastern Jersey City, NJ is one of those highway things that just kindof 'happened'. In the relatively early days of the automobile, the Holland Tunnel and the Pulaski Skyway (including the tunnel between the paired one-way surface streets and the Skyway itself, which goes off of the map to the west) were built to provide a convenient way to get into and out of lower Manhattan from the west. Later on, the New Jersey Turnpike extension was built to provide a better connection between the Holland Tunnel and the Turnpike, and a westward extension to that brought with it the 'I-78' designation.

All along, the four blocks of paired one-way surface streets were maintained as part of the route, even after I-78 was extended through the Holland Tunnel into New York City in anticipation of its further extension across Brooklyn and Queens to the Throgs Neck Bridge, to end at I-95 in the Bronx. However, plans often do change, and much of this proposed I-78 routing through NYC was cancelled in the 1970s (it is possible that some of this routing *might* be resurrected across Brooklyn, but if it is, it would use a somewhat different routing, and likely not the Williamsburg Bridge). Since part of the cancelled I-78 routing included a connection between the Holland Tunnel and the Williamsburg Bridge (the 'Lower Manhattan Expressway'), I-78 ends either inside the Holland Tunnel, or at its east approach.

There are a very limited few places on the I-system that use surface streets with traffic light intersections as parts of their routes, but this section of I-78 is by far the most major of them.

US 1 and US 9 share the same routing on this map, they come in from the north (at the lower left corner of the scale) and head out to the west on the Pulaski Skyway. The 1998 Rand-McNally Road Atlas shows a 'TRUCK US 1/9'. It diverges from the Pulaski Skyway just off the left edge of the map and is there because of size/weight limits on the Skyway.

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