At the beginning of the pandemic I was driving up and down the Jersey Turnpike and throughout southern NJ a lot. It was nice being the only car on the road for minutes at a time. But it was also terrifying the number of people who felt the open roads meant they should find the limits of their cars.

In April and May, I saw several single car accidents where people clearly misjudged the curve in the highway and just flew off the road. And while it is common to see accidents even daily, the accidents I saw in that time frame were generally severe instead of the person who didn't quite stop in time for backed up traffic. I saw a lot of mangled cars. Once traffic started picking back up in summer, people were still driving way too fast for the roads and the heavier traffic. I started seeing more multi-car accidents on some stretches of road. Eventually NJ started putting "Speeding Tickets require court appearance" on their digital signage. That did seem to help, at least the crazy accidents seemed to be less often.