Warehouse and Delivery Truck Crashes Around Exit 8A

This page explains why so many trucks run through Cranbury, Monroe, Jamesburg and South Brunswick, what the crash data shows, how these crashes tend to happen, and which police department holds your report. Garces, Grabler & LeBrocq, P.C. handles the company-by-company work described below so that you do not have to.

NJDOT describes the area around Interchange 8A as “a large and growing industrial area” (NJDOT 2023 Statewide Freight Plan). The NJTPA’s Southern Middlesex County Freight Movement Study, completed in 2023, puts it this way: “Large e-commerce and retail companies, including Amazon, Costco, Wayfair, Home Depot, and Petco have distribution centers near the interchange. Additionally, shipping companies such as UPS and FedEx have warehouses in the area.”

The same study counted 17 planned, pending or approved large site plans in county records for 2020 through 2022. Fifteen of them were warehouses, together adding more than 8 million square feet of freight-generating floor area. Its traffic counts found that “the highest share of trucks was found at Interchange 8A,” and that the three highest truck-volume points in the study area were the 8A ramp at CR 535 (Cranbury-South River Road), the 8A ramp at NJ 32 (Forsgate Drive) eastbound, and US 130 between CR 522 (Ridge Road) and Fresh Ponds Road.

Drivers also stop here. NJDOT’s inventory lists 80 public truck-parking spaces at the Molly Pitcher Service Area and 5 at the 7-Eleven in Jamesburg (NJDOT 2023 Statewide Freight Plan). Those are counts, not a judgment about whether the supply is adequate.

Turning crashes at ramps and driveways. A tractor-trailer swings wide to make a right turn, and a car in the next lane is caught between the trailer and the curb. The freight study treated this as a design problem in the 8A area and recommended truck-turning fixes at Hightstown-Cranbury Station Road and CR 615. It also named CR 535 near 8A, Costco Drive and CR 522 as its truck-crash hotspots, asked GPS providers to stop routing trucks through neighborhoods, and called for compliant clearance signage on CR 522 (NJTPA freight study, 2023).

Rear-end crashes in queues. Trucks stack up at the toll plaza, at warehouse gates and at the signals on US 130 and Ridge Road. Front-to-rear was the most common collision type in Middlesex fatal crashes involving a large truck: 16 of 49 (2019–2024, NHTSA FARS). The questions in these cases are following distance, speed, brakes and whether the driver was fatigued or on a phone.

Box-truck underride. Delivery box trucks sit high enough that a car can slide under the rear or side. On September 2, 2026, a car went under a delivery box truck on Homestead Avenue in Woodbridge; firefighters needed a prolonged effort to free the driver. The condition of the truck’s rear guard matters, and it has to be inspected before the truck is repaired. The mechanics are explained on the firm’s underride page.

Blind-spot and lane-change crashes. Van-body trucks have long blind zones on both sides, and the merges onto US 130 and NJ 32 put cars in them. The firm’s blind-spot page covers how these crashes are investigated.

The name painted on the truck door is a starting point, not the answer. The police crash report manual tells officers to record the motor carrier responsible for the cargo in Boxes 50 to 52, and warns that the number on the door “may not be that of the carrier responsible for the vehicle/load.” Statewide, leasing and rental names appear often in crash records because the officer wrote down the truck’s owner rather than the carrier operating it (NJDOT 2022 crash data; NJTR-1 manual, 2017).

Leasing does not shield the carrier. Under federal leasing rules, the carrier using a leased truck must have “exclusive possession, control, and use of the equipment” and “assume complete responsibility for the operation of the equipment” (49 CFR 376.12). The federal safety rules also define “employee” to include an independent contractor while driving a commercial vehicle, so a carrier cannot point to a contractor driver and step away.

Brokers are now reachable too. In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, decided May 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a claim that one company negligently hired another to transport goods is not preempted by federal law. A broker that put an unsafe carrier on the road can be sued under New Jersey law. Brokers are required to carry only a $75,000 bond, so whether a particular broker has its own liability insurance has to be checked case by case. Shippers and warehouses that loaded or dispatched the truck hold the loading and dispatch records, and sometimes gate-camera video.