New Jersey drivers are passionate defenders of their quirks. You might have heard that "Jersey girls don’t pump gas," even though 48 other states allow such an abomination.

And now state Sen. James W. Holzapfel (R-Ocean) has gone and slandered the jughandle.

The "Jersey Left" has befuddled out-of-state drivers since it became the norm for left-hand turns in the Garden State roughly 60 years ago. Holzapfel — a Jersey native, not some transplanted malcontent — thinks the jughandle has outlived its usefulness. He's not looking to rip them out; he just wants to ban construction of new ones.

The senator’s wish makes sense on the surface: Jughandles are clunky, confusing and eat up acres of valuable real estate. Where else are you forced to turn right to go left? But there’s evidence they improve safety and ease traffic congestion.

The jughandle is oddly polarizing. Motorists love them — taking comfort in the simplicity of right turns, even when a U-turn means making three turns in a row. Or they hate them, and the uncertainty of never quite knowing when or how you’re supposed to make your next left turn.

Holzapfel’s primary point against the jughandle is his experience on busy highways — Route 37, which carries traffic through Toms River to Seaside Heights, is in his district. Jughandles make heavy traffic worse.

But traffic engineering studies say jughandles actually do more to keep traffic flow moving.

By moving the turning vehicles off to the side, travel lanes are left wide open to through traffic. And signals stay longer on green, because there’s no need to interrupt it with a left-turn light. Even if a jughandle causes backups such as the ones Holzapfel describes, a motorist’s overall trip is likely to be smoother and faster than it would on a highway dotted by left-turn lanes.

And jughandles don’t require any more real estate or cost more to build than a traditional intersection with extra lanes added for left turns. Most important, jughandle intersections see fewer deadly head-on crashes than those with left-turn lanes.

The truth is, much of today’s traffic congestion would overwhelm any intersection, no matter the left-turn layout. The congestion problem can be solved better by adjusting traffic signal timing than reconfiguring New Jersey’s intersections.

New Jersey has killed off highway dinosaurs before. The state began phasing out traffic circles 15 years ago. Most of the major circles have been reworked; only a handful remain. Maybe the jughandle’s time will come to an end, too. Holzapfel’s first attempt to outlaw jughandles was in 1993. Last week, for the first time, his bill made it out of committee and moved on to the full Senate.

For the sake of speed and safety, that’s where it should stop.

Despite perceptions, reality is that the old, awkward jughandle does its job well. It never caught on in other states? That’s their problem. For New Jersey, it’s part of the motoring landscape, an important oddity of the culture. Most important, it’s an effective traffic tool. There’s no reason to take it out of the toolbox.