New Jersey vs Virginia vs Maryland vs Delaware vs North Carolina (live, best)
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It gets such a bad rap, but in actuality it has some very desirable suburbs and it has the second most miles of public beaches on the East Coast only second to Florida, with so many great quaint and iconic beach towns.
You have NYC, Philadelphia and the Poconos all at your disposal with great public commuter rail transit throughout.
That NJ beach thing is wrong. There are no private beaches in NC, and I think the Outer Banks alone are longer than the Jersey Shore.
It is true that other states can’t match NJ in the “almost but not quite” category.
Most of North Carolina's beaches are considered a barrier island, therefore the majority of the beaches in North Carolina have few amenities and a large percentage of those coastal barrier islands are extremely isolated and considered to be preserved parkland and not livable beach communities. A sizable portion of North Carolina beaches you cannot even access by car because they are barrier islands. With that...
Im not saying they are not nice, but they are very different in their topography and are very much limited with how accessible they are.
Where the Jersey beaches have much fewer barrier islands and therefore have more beach towns with an overall larger beach population and New Jersey has much more public accessible beaches.
Jersey even has public transit from both NYC and Philadelphia via train to get to its beaches. North Carolina has no such thing.
Asbury Park, Avalon, Stone Harbor, Ocean City, Ocean Grove, Long Beach Island, Cape May, etc. etc. are all true gems.
North Carolina's population centers are actually quite far from the coastline because its coast never was a shipping point because of these barrier islands overall, with the exception of Wilmington.
Last edited by rowhomecity; 03-01-2021 at 09:38 PM..
Most of North Carolina's beaches are considered a barrier island, therefore the majority of the beaches in North Carolina have few amenities and a large percentage of those coastal barrier islands are extremely isolated and considered to be preserved parkland and not livable beach communities. A sizable portion of North Carolina beaches you cannot even access by car because they are barrier islands. With that...
Im not saying they are not nice, but they are very different in their topography and are very much limited with how accessible they are.
Where the Jersey beaches have much fewer barrier islands and therefore have more beach towns with an overall larger beach population and New Jersey has much more public accessible beaches.
Jersey even has public transit from both NYC and Philadelphia via train to get to its beaches. North Carolina has no such thing.
Asbury Park, Avalon, Stone Harbor, Ocean City, Ocean Grove, Long Beach Island, Cape May, etc. etc. are all true gems.
North Carolina's population centers are actually quite far from the coastline because its coast never was a shipping point because of these barrier islands overall, with the exception of Wilmington.
That seems a long winded way to say NC has more miles of public beaches than NJ. Incidentally you can access almost the entire NC coastline by car. Parts of Cape Lookout are inaccessible, but otherwise I think you are good to go, including all of the Outer Banks, Hatteras to the Virginia border.
All that’s to say I agree New Jersey’s beach towns and NC’s beach towns are very different. NJ’s beach towns are amazing and varied (shout out to Manasquan, Sea Girt, and Spring Lake). But the actual point you made about having more miles of public beach is wrong.
Most of NC is made of barrier islands not accessible to people. That is the point.
This is just wrong. All of NC’s beaches are accessible to people. The Outer Banks is completely open to people and cars (and vacation homes). They aren’t Gilded Age towns like NJ has, but they are accessible. Of the very few places on the coastline inaccessible by car (Shackleford the one jumping out), they are accessible by boat.
Flip NJ and VA and I’ll agree with this list and the spacing.
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