New Jersey doesn’t let you turn left the way the rest of the country does. On a divided highway like Route 9 through Howell, you exit right, loop around, and cross the whole highway at a light. That’s a jughandle, and it produces a very specific kind of crash: a car coming out of the ramp is struck broadside by traffic on Route 9, or a driver already on Route 9 slams into a vehicle that has stopped short to take the ramp.
Route 9 through Howell is one of the busiest surface corridors in Monmouth County — three lanes each way, a jughandle or ramp every few hundred yards for the shopping centers, and a constant mix of local drivers who know the pattern and out-of-towners who don’t. When two of those cars meet, the fault fight starts immediately, and it usually comes down to who had the light and who was where they were supposed to be.
The three ways a Howell jughandle crash usually happens
- Crossing against the signal. A driver in the jughandle enters the intersection to cross Route 9 while the through traffic still has a green. This is the classic T-bone, and the impact is almost always to the side of the crossing vehicle.
- Getting rear-ended on the approach. A driver on Route 9 brakes hard and late to catch the jughandle exit. The car behind — traveling at a 50-mph corridor speed — has nowhere to go.
- The illegal left. A driver skips the jughandle entirely and tries to turn left across a signed no-left-turn median or through a break in traffic. New Jersey requires drivers to obey posted turning markers at intersections under N.J.S.A. 39:4-123, and doing it anyway is both a ticket and powerful evidence of negligence.
How fault actually gets decided
The core rule is right of way. N.J.S.A. 39:4-90 governs who must yield at an intersection, and where a traffic signal controls the crossing, the question becomes simple and factual: who had the green? That answer comes from signal timing, independent witnesses, the physical damage pattern, and — on Route 9 in particular — dashcams and the security cameras on the retail buildings lining the highway. Those cameras overwrite quickly, sometimes within days, which is why the early request matters more than almost anything else in the file.
New Jersey uses modified comparative negligence under N.J.S.A. 2A:15-5.1. Your recovery is reduced by whatever share of fault is assigned to you, and if you’re found more than 50% responsible, you recover nothing. In jughandle cases the insurer’s opening move is almost always to push some percentage of fault onto the injured driver — you entered too soon, you stopped too abruptly, you should have seen them. That number is negotiable, and it is worth real money.
The insurance side New Jersey drivers forget
Your own PIP coverage pays your initial medical bills no matter who caused the crash — you use it first, and you do not wait for the fault fight to resolve before getting treated. Separately, N.J.S.A. 39:6A-8 means the auto policy option you selected controls whether you can sue for pain and suffering at all. If you chose the limitation-on-lawsuit (verbal threshold) option, your injury has to meet a statutory category before that part of a claim is available. Most people have no idea which option they picked; it’s on your declarations page, and it is one of the first things worth checking.
There is also a clock. Under N.J.S.A. 2A:14-2, most New Jersey personal injury claims must be filed within two years of the crash. Different and much shorter deadlines apply if a government entity is involved — a county vehicle, a municipal truck, a road-condition claim — so the fact that Route 9 is a state highway is not a detail to hand-wave.
What to do after a jughandle crash in Howell
- Call police from the scene and make sure a report is generated, even if the damage looks moderate.
- Photograph the signal heads, the lane markings, the jughandle signage, and the final resting positions of both vehicles before anything moves.
- Note every business with a camera facing the intersection.
- Get evaluated. Side-impact and rear-end injuries frequently present a day or two later, and a gap in treatment is the first thing an adjuster points at.
If the other driver was ticketed for the turn, that matters. Our guide to failure to yield and merging tickets in NJ explains how those charges work, and Route 9 accidents in Monmouth County covers the corridor more broadly.
Get someone on it before the footage is gone
If you were hurt in a jughandle or intersection crash on Route 9, Route 33, or anywhere in Howell Township, the useful evidence has a short shelf life. Call Goldman Law Firm at 908-692-7745 for a free consultation, or start with our Howell car accident lawyer page and our full NJ car accident guide.