Parkway Exit 88 May Be Gone, But 89 Takes You Where You Went Before In Brick

When the New Jersey Turnpike Authority announced Monday that it was closing Exit 88 on the Garden State Parkway for good overnight, the sparse news release left a lot of people asking one question:

How do we get to Route 70 now?

The answer, it turns out, is very simple: Exit 89 takes drivers back to the very place they’ve exited for decades.

A quick trip down the Parkway Wednesday evening to check it out showed the setup is fairly simple and well-marked. When you exit at 89 and pay your 50-cent toll, the road is divided beyond the toll booth. Stay to the right, and it takes you the part of Exit 89 that many already were familiar with: Airport Road, where you can access Cedar Bridge Road.

Stay to the left, however, and you’re funneled down a service road that parallels the Parkway and brings you right out where you’ve always exited in the past, across from the gas station and the motel.

The two options at 89 are labeled as Exit 89 B and Exit 89 C, with Exit 89 B taking you to Route 70 and Exit 89 C taking you to Airport Road.

A word of caution: The distance from the toll booth to the split for the two exits is short and with the new set-up, there are drivers who are confused, which leads to lane-changing at the last second. There are E-ZPass lanes on either end of the toll booth, with an exact change lane and a cash lane sandwiched between them. The merging can be a bit dicey at rush hour, as you can see in the 3-minute video clip below.