I filled it with gas on Friday, and when I got home, it smelled like gas. I thought that maybe station attendant spilled some gas on the car when he filled it up.
The whu' ...??
Does NJ still commonly have gas stations with attendants who fill up the customers' cars? I haven't seen one of those in literally decades.
I'm sure Chuck can tell you why, but in NJ, apparently you are not allowed to pump your own gas!
It's the law, or so I've heard. Being just across the river from Jersey, I've heard the law was made to protect jobs, but I'm sure Chuck can us whether that's true or not.
Yes, it must be about protecting jobs. Self-pumping gas has been around in most places for decades and I've never heard of it being a big safety or environmental hazard.
Chuck, can you clear up the mystery?
It was one big change for me when I migrated. In Australia you almost always fill your own tank with petrol while in New Zealand you rarely have to do so, or often I will put the nozzle into the tank as the attendant is busy and then s/he comes and takes over while I go in to the shop to pay. One funny time was when I asked her to 'fill her up' and she asked me where my twang came from. The vowel 'i' is very different in Australia and NZ. Now I am careful to pronounce 'fill" the NZ way.
I had problems in Alaska because I had to put my postcode into the machine with the card and had to go into the office and the guy came out and only with great difficulty would he start the pump for me, I had to leave my card in the office. In Australia you sometimes have to put your card in first but mainly late at night in cities. There are unattended pumps in small country towns in NZ where you put your card in first. Generally you fill then go in and pay. There are drive offs but they are rare enough to be reported in the paper and of course are recorded on CCTV so usually a stolen car.
At 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, New Jersey became the last state in the nation where drivers are not allowed to pump their own gasoline around the clock.
That is when Oregon, the only other holdover from the full-service era of the 1970s, loosened its restrictions. Its new law allows residents of most counties with fewer than 40,000 people to fuel up their cars themselves.
That leaves Jersey, only Jersey, with its dense tangle of highways and byways, its turnpike rest stops named for state luminaries and its status as the home of the first drive-in theater, as the sole state where it is illegal everywhere to fill your own tank 24 hours a day.
It is a distinction that makes Declan J. O’Scanlon Jr., a state lawmaker, spout frustration by the gallon.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Mr. O’Scanlon, a Republican assemblyman from Monmouth County who will soon take a seat in the State Senate.
“If I want to pull in, get in and out quickly, I should be able to do so.”Mr. O’Scanlon said that he frequently pumps his own gas, ignoring the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act of 1949, the statute that first forbade civilians from putting their grubby hands on the nozzle.
“I break the law in New Jersey on a regular basis,” he said.
“Someone can come to my door and cuff me if they want.”Two years ago in the Assembly, Mr. O’Scanlon was one of several legislators to sponsor a bill allowing self-service stations. It stalled.
One prominent opponent of the idea is the president of the State Senate, Stephen M. Sweeney, a Democrat, who remains immovable. In an emailed statement Friday, Mr. Sweeney said that he saw no good reason to change a system that worked.
“When we have winters like the one this year, I don’t see many men and women who want to pump their own gas,” he said.
“It’s something that makes New Jersey a little more unique and the people of New Jersey like it that way.”Polling and interviews suggest that the state’s natives agree. The actor Bobby Cannavale, who grew up in the state, said that it never bothers him, though he does forget every time he leaves and comes back, and has to be ushered back into his car by the attendant. He added that he sometimes gets nervous for a split second that he’ll never get his credit card back.
“You’re sitting in your car just handing a guy your credit card,” he said.
“He can hand it to another guy in another car and you’re done.”Chris Christie proposed self-serve gas during his gubernatorial campaign in 2009, but dropped the proposal because the negative response from the public was so ferocious. At a town hall-style meeting in 2016, he said that it was a gender issue, citing a poll that indicated that 78 percent of women in the state were only too happy to stay in their cars.
Ashley Koning, the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University, said in an interview that the idea of pumping one’s own gas had never been broadly favorable in New Jersey.
“It’s kind of one of the third rails of state politics,” she said, noting that women and older people in particular enjoyed the service.
A December 2015 Rutgers-Eagleton poll found that almost three-quarters of the state’s residents preferred to have gas pumped for them, and that 84 percent of women preferred the service.
(article continues at the link below)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/nyregion/new-jersey-gas-pump.html
Topic: Cellar Scribblings (Read 10907424 times)