The Pennsylvania Turnpike holiday mess
The Pennsylvania Turnpike was at its worst yesterday when we were driving back 635 miles from Holland, Michigan, to Harrisburg, PA. I don't know why I was surprised--this happens nearly every year on the Sunday after Thanksgiving--but the mess this year seemed especially bad.
Traffic crawled along at 15-20 mph or slower on the stretch of the Turnpike between Pittsburgh and Breezewood, where large numbers of drivers returning from the Midwest and western Pennsylvania get off on I-70 to head down to Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia. We were moving in a pack with the same vehicles for much of that stretch. There was plenty of time, for example, to read all the bumper stickers on the back of the Talmudic Academy van, or the ads for a Wisconsin bed-and-breakfast on the mud flaps of a tractor-trailer. Very clever that!
I will give credit to the Turnpike Commission or PennDOT, whichever was in charge, for having moving electronic signs alerting drivers to upcoming "congestion," which was putting it mildly. There are also AM 1610 radio broadcasts at key points. Although they sound like they were recorded in a roomful of kids, they do provide a modicum of information about the traffic nightmare you're about to face.
The Turnpike badly needs a third lane on both the eastbound and westbound sides between the New Stanton and Fort Littleton exits--congestion approaching Breezewood was bad on the westbound side as well. There are third lanes in a few places, but most of that stretch is two-lane. I suppose the powers-that-be will argue that it isn't worth all that expense (possibly including new tunnels as well) to handle the traffic on one or two days of the year. But I have to think that having third lanes would also help when accidents occur at any time of the year, making it more likely that traffic can continue moving around an accident scene.
We decided to take a dinner break from the slow-moving traffic at Bedford. The eastbound exit lane is a single lane, and it was backed up nearly to the Turnpike. There are no EZ Pass-only lanes at Bedford, so motorists like us with EZ Pass have to wait in line behind people paying cash tolls, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of EZ Pass.
Rest areas also need attention. There was no excuse for overflowing waste cans and empty towel dispensers in the restrooms. On a busy travel day, you put on more maintenance people. Harder to solve are the tiny food service areas at some of the rest areas, and the poorly-designed traffic flows to the gas pumps. Charging $3.17 per gallon for regular at the Somerset rest area, by the way, verged on price gouging to take advantage of all those travelers.
All in all, we were quite happy to pull into Shipoke. It turned out that our neighbors, Gene and Carol Gangwish, had gotten caught in the same Turnpike traffic mess we had. We unpacked, watched the Eagles valiantly fight the Patriots, and then fell asleep.