No matter how long or enjoyable the ride, it’s never wise to overshoot the exit, so as of this week I’m retiring as The Road Warrior for NorthJersey.com, The Record and the USA TODAY Network New Jersey.

For anybody with a calculator or odometer, that totals 1,700 columns and about a quarter-million miles of traffic jams, highway crashes, broken street lights, long inspection lines and other Infuriating Driving Issues Of the Day that I call IDIODs.

What a hoot!

Way back in 1990, The Road Warrior began as a forum for commuters to vent about road, rail and bus conditions to my predecessor Jeffrey Page, who was given just three orders: Emphasize the warriors who use these systems, not the bureaucrats who run them, be as irreverent as you dare, and try to fix something.

So, from potholes and predatory tows to drivers who text, drink, speed and doze, the next 28 years amounted to a roller coaster ride that rarely failed to surprise. By journalistic standards, the highlight of my 15 years turned out to be a column that halted five mornings of politically motivated traffic jams that culminated in jail terms for two officials responsible for the so-called Bridgegate scandal.

But for me, much deeper satisfaction has always stemmed from readers whose passion, pain or persistence inspired me to dig beyond circumstances that seemed innocuously routine, yet turned out to be much, much more.

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The classic example was Mildred Van Zwaren, a Spanish teacher from Ridgefield, who was the first commuter to insist that I investigate local lane closures leading to the George Washington Bridge because they were creating the kind of local gridlock that far exceeded what I initially thought was “Fort Lee’s usual rush-hour congestion.”

Another example was the anonymous motorist who asked: "Why do you think so many guardrails are missing from Route 80 and the Garden State Parkway?" Some digging revealed that drug addicts had sawed loose some $21 million in aluminum rails over the years and sold them to junkyards for just enough money to feed their habits.

There also was Dale Dreisbach of Ramsey, one of several who alerted me to the havoc caused on the GWB overnight when scores of cash-paying motorists would speed 500 feet in reverse to avoid E-ZPass tolls that had replaced toll collectors.

You can’t make this stuff up.

When people read about such things, it reminds them of their own unaddressed gripes – the E-ZPass surcharge, the ankle-deep potholes, the knee-deep litter, bouncing runaway tires, at-risk teens, vulnerable pedestrians, unlighted highways, Big Brother cameras, late trains, later buses, the dearth of highway rest rooms…

The list goes on.

Few news organizations keep after such “little stories” anymore. They’re considered insignificant or too “hyper-local” to make real news. Fortunately, I worked for an organization that specialized in finding the big story in the little story. In many ways, every story had potential – even potholes. After all, there are tens of thousands of these cracks and crevices each year on the roads in our region, including hundreds that once tortured residents of a hilly, lumpy street in Hawthorne that the borough refused to pave for 20 years.

Somehow, though, attitudes began to change when residents complained to a certain newspaper. It took three years of columns naming Brockhuizen Road “the most pothole-ridden street in two counties,” but Hawthorne finally found enough cash and asphalt to make it road-worthy again.

It took less time to wake up Trenton about predatory towers.

Just ask Linda and Charles Leone, who spent $6 on a leisurely Sunday senior-citizens special at the local IHOP, then went looking for the car they’d parked in the adjacent McDonald’s lot because the pancake house lot was too crowded. Smooth-talking scam artists towed their Honda then bilked the Fair Lawn couple out of more than 40 times the cost of their breakfast — $275 — just to get it back. The scammers insisted they were doing the Leones a favor. If police had responded to this “violation,” they claimed the fine might be $495.

Towing, it turned out, was not an industry monitored by the state. Cars were sometimes ransomed for as much as $3,000. But the Leone case, which was featured here, generated legislation that put New Jersey’s 1,500 towers under the thumb of the state Consumer Affairs Division. The bill was signed into law the following year in the IHOP lot that was again crowded – with news crews.

If it weren’t for people like the Leones informing the press, I sometimes wonder how so-called “minor” predatory road practices would get addressed. Luckily, New Jersey is blessed with dozens of folks who do much more than write columns. A few I’ve encountered along the road deserve a lot more credit than they get.

Actually, I’m considering using some of my upcoming free time to lobby the Vatican on behalf of Paterson’s Benny Gonzalez. Isn’t it about time Pope Francis conferred sainthood on the brain-damaged man who has spent nearly every day of the last two decades of his life clearing and bagging tons of litter he finds on two of the highways that run through his city?

Yeah, I know, litter is too small an issue to rate sainthood – except Benny, who gets by on disability insurance, “curates” his finds. How else to describe the time he spends tracking down the owners of the stolen wallets, jewelry, equipment, documents and personal memorabilia he collects simply so he can return them – all free of charge because he wants to “give back to the community” that’s been good to him?

Who does that? Only a saint.

Cathy Eastman of Washington Township also deserves our admiration for convincing state legislators to pass a law minimizing the kind of winter danger that killed her husband, Michael, after ice flew off a truck and smashed through his windshield. Readers aided this cause after we urged them to send me formal requests for a law that imposes fines for carrying rooftop snow and ice. We forwarded some 2,400 responses to the governor, who signed the bill.

And no one has done more for road warriors than Pam Fischer, who pioneered landmark driver-safety reforms when she was director of New Jersey’s Highway Traffic Safety Division and later as the organizer of a coalition that includes two dozen road-safety groups. Under normal conditions, Fischer, now a consultant for several national road-safety organizations, would be an ideal candidate to replace the current traffic-safety director who is expected to retire this year.

But that’s unlikely.

“I’m not sure who would want that job now,” she said.

The reason: marijuana.

Gov. Phil Murphy wants to raise $1 billion or more in revenue through the sale and regulation of pot, a plan that police and local prosecutors believe will compromise driver safety, partly because current technology can’t detect inebriation from pot as effectively as breath tests detect the influence of alcohol.

“The governor needs to spell out all the social and safety impacts this might cause, as well as a plan for dealing with them,” said Fischer, a Republican who served on one of the governor’s transition teams. “That doesn’t just mean fines and penalties. It means sending some of that money back to prevention, enforcement and education that starts at an early age.”

In other words, own it. The governor must find ways, she said, to assure motorists that his plan won’t contribute to big increases in crashes, injuries and deaths.

That’s a tall order. But after following road safety for the first year or two, this road warrior began to realize something that too many experienced drivers ignore much too easily: Safety trumps everything else about the cars we love, including comfort, cost, speed, curb appeal and ease of handling. Driving, by far, is the most dangerous thing most of us do every day. Why tamper with something so fragile?

So, safety has been the priority for nearly everything published in this column for a long time. It can’t be proven, of course, but I like to think we might have saved a few lives and prevented substantial injury and damage over the years.

Based on the latest preliminary State Police count, here are a few frightening facts that can be proven:

A total of 564 people were killed on New Jersey roads in 2018, nearly a 10-percent decline compared to 2017. If that seems like genuine progress, traffic-safety experts will tell you otherwise. That figure still lags behind the all-time low of 542 in 2013.

“We’re going backwards,” Fischer insisted.

Indeed, national crash figures proportionately match New Jersey’s record.

Why is that? Aren’t cars safer than ever? Are too many of us too distracted to drive competently? Probably, but smartphone sales haven’t grown enough to account for an increase in driving distracted, the leading cause of road deaths.

Here’s a clue: 175 pedestrians were killed in 2018. The figure in 2017 was even higher – 183. Both years were the deadliest for walking across a New Jersey street in 25 years. Statistics on walking distracted, which obviously doesn’t require a license, generally aren’t documented.

But it’s much too easy to blame any spike in fatalities on one group of road users. Here’s one last observation from a know-it-all who has been stringing 15 years’ worth of words together on this topic:

We’re all to blame. Too many of us aren’t serious enough about our driving. We don’t even accept our obvious faults when we crash. We prevaricate. We call them accidents, but in almost every case, there is no such thing. Look it up.

“Accident” implies blamelessness. But except for hurricanes and other events beyond our control (during which we shouldn’t be driving anyway), there is ALWAYS blame – even if we believe it’s NEVER ours. Just ask Teaneck attorney Steve Benvenisti, a pedestrian-crash victim who was told several times while on a hospital respirator that he’d been in an "accident."

“When I later learned a drunk driver had crushed my legs, I vowed never to use that word again,” Benvenisti recalled. “Clients whose lives were ruined this way understand how these completely preventable crashes are never ‘accidents’.”

In other words, using a term that suggests a chance encounter trivializes an event that kills more than 35,000 Americans, injures millions of others and causes billions of dollars in damage every year. That’s why the Associated Press and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration now carefully use the word “crash” instead of “accident” in the vast majority of encounters.

Shouldn’t the rest of us do the same?

If you can’t stop speeding or yakking on a smartphone either behind the wheel or while crossing against a light, take one writer’s parting advice and at least use the correct, grown-up terminology when you crash or see a crash or talk about a crash or anticipate a crash.

Say it once or twice:

Crash! It’s an easy word to memorize. It’s popular, too. Now that I’m settling into a fixed income, I’ve noticed stockbrokers are using it more and more.

Email John Cichowski at jwcichowski@optonline.net