Time to think

By Hank Silverberg

Why we all hate I-95

     In the summer of 1919 the U-S army decided to send 81 vehicles from Washington, DC to San Francisco to test the ability to move men and machine from one coast to another. It took 62 days over back roads, through mud and across narrow mountain passes to travel the 3,251 miles to the west coast. Among those who made the trip was a young Lieutenant named Dwight D Eisenhower. Twenty-four years later as Supreme Allied Commander he witnessed how fast Germany was able to move its troops along the Autobahn as American troops defeated the Nazis.  Eisenhower would remember both events.  Promoted by President Eisenhower out of military necessity, the Interstate highway system was created by Congress on June 29, 1956. It took almost 50 years for the originally planned 48,000-mile system to be finished.  For decades it seemed Ike’s dream of an efficient continental road system had worked.  The completion was announced at a news conference in 1993, one of my first assignments as a reporter in Washington. The car culture was a success. You could see the USA in your Chevrolet at 65 miles an hour.

The 1919 cross country trip 

 (Courtesy of The National Archives) 

      But somewhere just before the turn of the 21^st century, after the tolls had been removed, and the initial debt paid off, the system’s age started to show. The capacity in some parts of the country had been exceeded. The most obvious example was the 1,919 miles of I-95.

     The Cross Bronx Expressway in New York was very slow to cross. The “Welcome to Connecticut” sign on the Westchester county border was an introduction to bumper to bumper traffic all the way to Milford. It took an hour to get through the tolls at the Delaware Memorial Bridge.  In Virginia the Springfield interchange, aptly nick-named “malfunction junction” and the Woodrow Wilson bridge got a long-awaited face lift, but Congress just couldn’t seem to get its act together and come up with billions of dollars to make other badly needed improvements and repairs.  The states, for the most part, were left to do it alone.

     The solution in the Old Dominion, car pools, worked for while on High Occupancy Vehicle lanes. But the need for yet more pavement produced some public/private partnerships to build more. Both Democrats and Republicans skirted the idea of using public funds to do the job. That could jeopardize their political future. Instead, they made sweetheart deals with private companies to invest in new construction and recoup that investment through 99-year leases. The 95-Express lanes were born.  That gave commuters two choices. You could bust the family budget to make it home on time for dinner or sit in traffic jams for miles and miss the Little League game or band concert.   

     “Congestion pricing” is supposed to make it better. The idea is to guarantee a 55 mile an hour speed limit for those who can afford the Express lanes, by RAISING the price of tolls whenever there is a traffic jam in the main lanes. That discourages some people from going into the Express Lanes, to keep traffic flowing there, allegedly at 55. You now have three choices. Pay the high toll, form a carpool to ride free in the express lanes, or sit in traffic. Someone should write a song called “the day the car culture died”.  All that does is make the traffic jam bigger in the main lanes as people balk at tolls as high as twenty dollars.  Those with money don’t care. The rest of us sit bumper to bumper.  

    Over the last few years I have kept asking the same question. If this idea is so great, why are there still major backups? The bottlenecks, we were told will disappear as soon as the Express lanes are extended. So, the bottleneck at the mixing bowl moved south to the Occuquan. The bottleneck in Woodbridge moved south to Aquia. The bottleneck in Aquia moved south to Garrisonville and now we are told that bottleneck will go away as soon as the latest extension is added.  The 55 miles I travel two days a week now from Fredericksburg to Arlington are still a nightmare.  The tolls can be as high as 16 dollars sometimes, so I try to avoid them. To add insult to injury, the money others do pay goes into the pockets of foreign investors who financed the road instead of the state road construction and repair budget.

     I read the other day that another extension is coming, and a new bridge has been approved to cross the Rappahannock. The state is finally kicking in 125 million dollars to build it.  Opening on that bridge is set for 2022. I may be retired by then, but maybe not. I may have to tap into my retirement fund again to pay tolls for a few more years to avoid the traffic jam now forming at the exit to Route 3.  There has got to be a better way!

   
          ( Ideas for my next blog are welcome and so are comments. Email me at           HankSilverberg@gmail.com.)  


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