“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.