Can't figure this one out - Zones

This has been haunting me for months. Shipping to the North-East USA is inexpensive for me... shipping to the South-West is usually cost prohibitive. I'm looking to offer free shipping when it's possible, or adding an up-charge for the lower-western states.

All the threads/tutorials I've seen on zones are based on countries, but what about situations where it's literally 3x the price to send it to California compared to New Jersey?

In the attached image obviously I'd divide it by entire state, not trying to divide a state in half here.

I have the same problem, but I am only shipping in South Africa and not international so what I did was ad every City and Town in the country list and then edited the language files to read City or Town instead of Country and edited the checkout pages to show the country drop down list in the place of City. Now on registration you can choose your city from the drop down list and by giving each one a unique code I can configure shipping according to each town using zones.
Works fine for me for now but would like to see more options for all shipping modules.

Coredesigns:

I have the same problem, but I am only shipping in South Africa and not international so what I did was ad every City and Town in the country list and then edited the language files to read City or Town instead of Country and edited the checkout pages to show the country drop down list in the place of City. Now on registration you can choose your city from the drop down list and by giving each one a unique code I can configure shipping according to each town using zones.
Works fine for me for now but would like to see more options for all shipping modules.
It's a good suggestion, and I might use it as a last resort. I'm currently doing flat-rate, but I'm concerned about when/if I go back to using the UPSXML module and what kind of effect that will have.