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New Jersey

New Jersey swiftly followed Delaware and Pennsylvania in ratifying the U.S. Constitution, becoming state number three on December 18th, 1787. Though the fifth-smallest state by land area, its 2024 estimated population of 9.5 million (falling just outside the top-ten in that ranking) makes it America's most densely-populated state. This can mostly be attributed to its location between Philadelphia and New York City, and inclusion of some of its counties in each metropolitan area. New Jersey's most-populous city is Newark, with just over 300,000 residents, and its capital is Trenton, the site of a major Revolutionary War victory for George Washington's Continental Army.

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An "S" bookended by the Delaware River and the Atlantic Ocean, New Jersey is known for its Jersey Shore along the latter coastline which features Cape May (which lends the state its extra bit of land at the bottom-right), Wildwood, gambling town Atlantic City, Ocean City and Seaside Heights. Long Beach Island is a barrier island situated along the Shore. Various inlets to the Atlantic, like the Hudson River and its Upper Bay, separate the state from the New York City boroughs of Staten Island and Manhattan. Going inland, elevation becomes higher, ultimately resulting in a portion of the Appalachian Mountains in the state's northwest. High Point, the state's highest point, rises 1,803 feet above sea level in Sussex County.

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State attractions include Wildwood's Morey's Piers, Margate's Lucy the Elephant, Six Flags Great Adventure, the Delaware Water Gap, and MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, home of the National Football League's New York Giants and Jets. Rock singers Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, pop icon Whitney Houston, and racing driver Martin Truex Jr. were all born here.

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New Jersey's most famous of highways is the New Jersey Turnpike, running north-south along the height of the state from the Delaware Memorial to the George Washington Bridge with service areas named for people important to state history. The northern half and change of the Turnpike bears the designation of Interstate 95, which enters from Pennsylvania on a Delaware River bridge along a Turnpike extension; this routing of I-95 was made possible by a nearby Pennsylvania Turnpike interchange project, decades after the cancellation of I-95's original routing through New Jersey along the Somerset Freeway. Interstate 76 has roughly two miles in the state, coming in out of Philadelphia via the Walt Whitman Bridge. Interstate 78 runs through Bridgewater and Newark prior to its eastern terminus beyond the Holland Tunnel in lower Manhattan, and Interstate 80 likewise has its east end at I-95 at the north end of the NJTP mainline. New Jersey also has three-digit Interstates including Interstate 195 in Central Jersey (connecting Trenton with the Shore), Interstate 295 running parallel to the Delaware River and the Turnpike; Interstate 278 in Elizabeth; and Interstate 287 in North Jersey (a western and northern bypass of NYC, which provides a straight shot from the NJTP onto Staten Island as Route 440). The unnumbered Garden State Parkway emerges from Cape May and meets the Turnpike in Woodbridge before cutting through North Jersey, and the Atlantic City Expressway provides most of the link between Philadelphia and Atlantic City.

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U.S. Route 1 runs in a mostly straight, diagonal line between Trenton and the G.W. Bridge, and U.S. Route 9 was the original through route along the Shore; the two routes share pavement from south of Newark into upper Manhattan. U.S. routes 30, 40 and 322 all enter the Garden State via crossings of the Delaware, and all terminate in the Atlantic City area. U.S. Route 46, contained entirely within New Jersey, notoriously ends in the middle of the G.W. Bridge at the state line, and the also-intrastate U.S. Route 130 is the surface route running alongside I-295 through the bedroom communities of Gloucester and Camden counties. U.S. Route 22 parallels and sometimes overlaps with I-78 to its end in Bayonne; in Bridgewater, while I-78 and I-287 share an exchange, US 22 does likewise with U.S. routes 202 and 206.

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