I-95 from the Turnpike to the Palm Beaches
This is the busiest car-hauling corridor on the East Coast, and it is one road: the Turnpike to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, then I-95 through Baltimore, Richmond, the Carolinas and Savannah. A truck that loads full in North Jersey on a Monday is often unloading in Palm Beach County on Wednesday. Atlantic-coast cars stay on I-95 to the end; Orlando and Tampa cars turn onto I-4 at Daytona; Naples and Fort Myers cars cross Alligator Alley from Fort Lauderdale, which is the $100 difference in the city-pair table. The same trucks also run the longer cross-country lanes, but here they rarely stop more than twice.
Where the cars come from, where they land
About half the pickups are North Jersey, from Bergen County suburbs like Saddle River and Harrington Park through Essex and Hudson; a quarter are the Shore counties, Monmouth and Ocean; the rest are Trenton and South Jersey. Any address inside the I-287 ring fills a truck within the pickup window. At the Florida end most deliveries go to gated and 55-plus communities, where a 75-foot hauler cannot enter, so the driver arranges a door-to-door handoff at the clubhouse or the nearest shopping-center lot. Winter residents who fly down after the car often have the community office or a neighbor sign for it.
Snowbird timing turns the usual pattern upside down
On most lanes summer is the expensive season. Here it is winter: January is the single busiest month, September and October are the second peak, and winter orders have paid a $1,100 median against $825 in spring, when the snowbird flow turns north and southbound trucks run light. The reverse lane, Florida to New Jersey, peaks in April and May. Today the gap is wide, $1,105 south against $825 north, yet over four years the two directions have paid nearly the same median, $980 and $960, because the imbalance flips twice a year.
