Suburban historians have often overlooked the role of freight transport in shaping decentralization. This paper traces the history of suburban growth, economic decentralization, and industrial modernity through the impact of trucking on Northern New Jersey’s industrial economy in the middle third of the twentieth century. Freight shippers’ search for a way around the manifold frustrations of railroad-based goods movement produced the rise of the highway-based freight economy, and the creation of a new spatial politics of production. As trucks and paved roads encouraged suburbanization, and as changes in factory design and the labor market brought about a more sprawling industrial landscape, freight’s changing dynamics crystallized a permanent realignment of industry away from urban cores—and contributed to the parallel consensus about the incompatibility of dense urbanism with industry. As they left deindustrialized cities, extensive highway infrastructure, and new industrial forms in their wake, these new truck-dependent industrial suburbs helped create the New York region’s postindustrial urban economy.