Freehold Township is built around the two roads that generate most of its traffic summonses: Route 9 and Route 33. Both are divided highways where you cannot simply turn left. You take a jughandle, you cross traffic, you merge — and every one of those movements is a yield.
Which is why so many drivers here end up holding a summons for N.J.S.A. 39:4-90, failure to yield the right of way. Usually it shows up the same day as a crash, handed over at the roadside while the tow truck is still hooking up.
What 39:4-90 actually requires
The statute governs vehicles approaching or entering an intersection. In plain terms: the driver who arrives second yields to the driver already there, and when two vehicles reach an intersection at about the same time, the driver on the left yields to the driver on the right. A driver turning left across oncoming traffic must yield to any vehicle close enough to be an immediate hazard.
A related charge covers stop and yield signs — N.J.S.A. 39:4-144, failure to stop or yield at a stop sign, yield sign, or flashing red signal. It is not enough to slow down and roll through. The statute requires the stop, and then requires you to yield to traffic that is close enough to be a hazard once you proceed.
Both carry 2 points on your New Jersey driving abstract.
Where these tickets come from in Freehold Township
- Jughandle merges on Route 9 — you complete the loop, the light is with you, and you cross into traffic that had the right of way. Two drivers, two different accounts of who had the green.
- Route 33 and Route 537 intersections — long sight lines make oncoming speed hard to judge on a left turn.
- Shopping center exits — pulling out of a lot onto a highway, where the duty to yield sits entirely on the driver leaving the lot.
- Uncontrolled residential intersections — the “who got there first” fights, decided by two people’s memories.
Notice the pattern. Almost none of these are objective measurements the way a radar reading is. A speeding ticket rests on a number. A failure-to-yield ticket usually rests on a judgment call made after the fact, often by an officer who did not see the collision happen and is reconstructing it from where the vehicles came to rest and what two shaken drivers said at the scene.
The real cost is not the fine
Two points and a fine are the visible part. The part that hurts is what a guilty plea does to the accident claim sitting behind the ticket.
When you stand up in Freehold Township Municipal Court and plead guilty to failing to yield, you are not just resolving a summons — you are making a statement about how the crash happened. The other driver’s insurance company is very interested in that statement. If you were hurt in the same collision, that plea can be used against you when it is time to talk about who was responsible.
This is why the two cases have to be handled with each other in mind. New Jersey uses comparative negligence, and the percentage of fault assigned to you directly reduces what you can recover — we explain how that works in comparative negligence in New Jersey. A ticket resolved carelessly on Tuesday can cost far more than the fine when the injury claim is evaluated months later. The same trap shows up in intersection crashes across the county, like the ones we wrote about in left-turn crashes in Eatontown.
How these get defended
Because the case is built on observation rather than measurement, the file is where the work happens: the crash report and its diagram, any witness statements, body-worn and dash camera footage, photographs of the vehicle damage, and the timing of the traffic signal if one was involved. Damage patterns are stubborn things — they often tell a clearer story about angle and point of impact than either driver’s memory does. Our guide to municipal court discovery covers what you can request.
The other reality: charges in this family can sometimes be resolved differently than they were written, depending on your abstract and the facts. None of that is available to a driver who mails in a check. It is the trap we described in the plea-by-mail mistake, and it is worse here because of the civil claim attached to it.
Talk to us before your Freehold Township court date
We appear in municipal courts throughout Monmouth County and handle both sides of an intersection crash — the summons and the injury claim — so one does not quietly damage the other. Call Goldman Law Firm at 908-692-7745 for a free consultation, or read more about how we defend traffic tickets in Freehold Township and what to expect in Freehold Township Municipal Court. Bring the summons, the crash report if you have it, and photos of both vehicles.