Car Insurance in Stafford Township, NJ: Life on the LBI Causeway

Car insurance in Stafford Township prices for a town built around a single, unavoidable chokepoint. Stafford — which almost everyone just calls Manahawkin — sits at the mainland end of Route 72, the only road that reaches Long Beach Island. Every car headed to Ship Bottom, Beach Haven, or anywhere else on the island crosses Barnegat Bay here first, on the Manahawkin Bay Bridges.

That crossing just came out of more than a decade of construction, and the timing matters for anyone pricing a policy in Stafford right now.

Eleven Years, $320 Million, One Bridge

NJDOT's Route 72 Manahawkin Bay Bridges project added a second eastbound span alongside the original Manahawkin Bay Bridge and rehabilitated both the older structure and three smaller trestle bridges over the thorofares in between. The new eastbound span opened in April 2016, but the project ran in phases for years afterward — the fifth and final contract, covering roadway and drainage work on both the Stafford and Ship Bottom ends, was expected to finish by the end of 2024.

For a Stafford driver, that's more than a traffic footnote. Years of lane closures and shifting work zones on the only road in and out of a barrier island are the kind of condition that keeps accident rates elevated on a corridor — and once the work zones clear, that pressure eases.

A Bottleneck That Resets Every Summer

Construction aside, Route 72 through Stafford still turns into a seasonal bottleneck every year. From Memorial Day through Labor Day, the corridor fills with island-bound traffic — much of it unfamiliar with the road, driving rental cars or towing boats and jet skis toward the causeway. That combination of inexperienced drivers and concentrated volume on one route is exactly what insurers track when they price risk differently for a daily Route 72 commuter than for a driver who only sees the corridor on vacation weekends.

The Retail Strip Behind Exit 63

Away from the bridge, Stafford's other defining feature is the Route 72 commercial corridor fed by Garden State Parkway Exit 63 — a dense run of big-box stores and strip centers that pulls shoppers from across southern Ocean County, not just the township. Heavier parking-lot and intersection traffic in a retail district like that tends to generate more low-speed fender-benders than a quieter residential street, and claims history on a corridor shapes how local policies get priced over time.

What New Jersey Actually Requires

• Standard Policy minimums: $35,000 bodily injury per person / $70,000 per accident / $25,000 property damage, effective January 1, 2026.
• No-fault PIP: at least $15,000 in Personal Injury Protection per person, required on every policy sold in the state.
• Basic Policy alternative: $5,000 property damage and $15,000 PIP with no bodily injury liability requirement, unchanged by the 2026 increase.
• Uninsured motorist coverage: must match whatever bodily injury limits the policy carries.

For help deciding whether the state floor is enough for a town with Stafford's traffic pattern, see our minimum vs. full coverage guide.

Stafford's insurance picture comes down to one road and what's happening on it. With the Manahawkin Bay Bridges project finally out of its construction years, the corridor's biggest recent source of risk is easing — but the seasonal crush of island-bound traffic every summer isn't going anywhere, and it's still the detail that sets Stafford apart from a typical mainland Ocean County town.