New Jersey Route 72
State highway in New Jersey, US
Route 72 is a state highway in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It runs 28.7 mi (46.19 km) from the Four Mile Circle with Route 70 in Woodland Township in Burlington County to Long Beach Boulevard (CR 607) in Ship Bottom on Long Beach Island in Ocean County. Route 72 travels through the Pine Barrens as a two-lane undivided road. After an interchange with the Garden State Parkway, the route becomes a four- to six-lane divided highway through built-up areas of Manhawkin and crosses the Manahawkin Bay via the Manahawkin Bay Bridge onto Long Beach Island.
What is now Route 72 was originally designated as Route S40 in 1927, a spur of Route 40 (now Route 70) running from Four Mile to Manahawkin. The road was extended to Ship Bottom by 1941 before it was renumbered to Route 72 in 1953. A realignment that took place in 1969 between US 9 and the Manahawkin Bay Bridge resulted in the designation of Route 180 on the former alignment; this road is now CR 50. Plans in the late 1960s and the 1970s called for a proposed Route 72 freeway, running from the western terminus at Route 70 to the concurrently proposed I-895 at the New Jersey Turnpike in Westampton, connecting Philadelphia's northern suburbs with the Jersey Shore. The freeway plans along with I-895 were canceled by the 1980s. The Manahawkin Bay Bridge underwent deck repairs completed in May 2010, with the bridge slated to be rehabilitated and a parallel span to be built to the south.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q824376. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 1941, 1953 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Jersey Route 72” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.