Avoiding the Delaware Turnpike - the search for the elusive Northeast Passage
Posted Tue, 2007-11-13 10:00
Tollers watch out for this Mike Dresser guy. He's always advertising ways for your customers to avoid the toll route. If your revenues are dipping consider checking if the customers are taking a Dresserway instead of the tollway. With his Here's-how-to-avoid-the-toll pieces, the traffic correspondent of the Baltimore Sun is tapping into a deep well of frustration among many of his readers. Much of it focuses on Delaware.
Dresser has various names for his mission to help his readers avoid the Delaware tolls and notorious Delaware Turnpike
backups:
- the Search for the proverbial Northeast Passage
- the I-95 End Run
- the Delaware Avoidance Route
His latest enterprise (Baltimore Sun 2007-11-12) produces a Baltimore-Northern New Jersey route that is a mix of toll-free interstates and US routes, mostly through eastern Pennsylvania:
- I-83 to York
- US30 to Lancaster
- US283 then US222 to Reading and Allentown
- some wild maneuverings around Allentown, PA100 or 863 to avoid I-78 congestion
- I-78 and I-287 in northern New Jersey
Dresser claims this route can be traveled in 3hrs 45mins in times of even the heaviest traffic as compared to five hours for MD/DE/NJ/I-95, the turnpikes route. He claims that he timed his travel on his latest Delaware Avoidance Route and that a Rutgers university student had volunteered to travel the turnpikes route.
Dresser writes: "And where she paid $10.55 in tolls and endured multiple backups, I paid none and had clear sailing most of the way."
He claims it would work just as well the other way - southbound.
Dresser makes one mistake. The southbound route isn't strictly toll free. The Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC) has a toll westbound on I-78 at the Delaware River that affects his southbound route. But far cars it's a fiddly little toll - 75c cash 60c E-ZPass. (Why does anyone bother collecting a toll less than a dollar nowadays?)
Trucks by comparison get socked at the Delaware River. The truck tolls are 2-axles $5.00 cash/$4.75 E-ZPass, and 5 axles $16.25 cash, $15.44 E-ZPass peak, $13.81 E-ZPass offpeak. That car/truck differential suggests a heavy dose of politics is afflicting toll rate setting at the DRJTBC.
[For the geographically confused the Delaware River here has nothing to do with the state of Delaware. In this white water section it is the boundary between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Delaware, the state, is way down river on the south side of the tidal portion.]
Washington DC to Northern NJ DAR
Washington DC to northern NJ offers a near expressway standard Delaware Avoidance Route that is something of a variant to Dresser's route for Baltimoreans. It goes:
- I-270 to Frederick
- US-15 to Harrisburg
- I-81 north of Harrisburg
- I-78 joining Dresser's route in Allentown PA and in to Jersey
This is my favorite route to northern NJ/NY during peak hours in Baltimore or the Philly areas. Getting through Harrisburg and making the US15/I-81 connection can be tricky the first couple of times but the best route is to do a short hop of two legs east
on the Penn Pike, get off at the High Spire toll plaza I-283, wave to Joe Brimmeier and buddies in their executive suite in the glassy extension of the Pike's head offices nearby, proceed north on I-283/I-83 to I-81.
I-81 around Harrisburg is ridiculously narrow at just 3+3 lanes between the Turnpike and Harrisburg and 2+2 lanes Harrisburg east to I-78. On this 56km (35 mile) stretch it is carrying both north-south and east-west traffic, plus a good deal of local Harrisburg area traffic. This stretch should have been cosigned I-81/I-78. More important than signing its traffic volumes warrant 4+4 lanes. Given the truck volumes of over 12k/day it would justify truck-only lanes.
(We can't give you any actual traffic counts though our iimpression is they must be AADTs of 100k+. PennDOT's traffic data files are in xml code which in MS Excel generates a message that "The file you are trying to open is not a valid Excel XML Spreadsheet." http://www.pasda.psu.edu/uci/MetadataDisplay.aspx?entry=PASDA&file=patrafficcounts2007.xml&dataset=56)
PennDOT actually rebuilt the stretch of I-81 north of Harrisburg to I-78 about four years ago. But they incompetently rebuilt it to the exact same 2 lanes each direction. This bottleneck is most serious southbound because four lanes (2 of I-81 and 2 of I-78) merge suddenly into those two lanes south or west toward Harrisburg. That one act of stupidity by PennDOT engineers regularly has westbound I-78 traffic backed up all the way east into New Jersey and I-81 traffic southbound backed up north
to Hazelton.
We've been stuck there twice and the backups are Delawarian in scale. It's enough to drive you back to I-95 southbound, Delaware Turnpike and all.
But Dresser has us thinking that it may be worth taking part of his southbound route back to Frederick and Washington DC, getting off I-78 at Allentown to avoid Harrisburg, going US222 through Reading and Lancaster onto US30 through York to Gettysburg then south on US15. That would be a southern bypass of the horrendous I-81/I-78 double lane drop bottleneck.
York to Gettysburg on US30 is very tedious 2 lane stuff but almost all the rest is 2+2 lanes and a good bit of it is now expressway standard. [Dresser has one weird term in his piece. He calls expressways "closed access." That's absurd. If a road has access closed you could get on it, or off it. He meant to write controlled access.]
Dresser concedes that out of peak times the turnpikes route on I-95 is the quicker one but adds: "At 3am, even I would go through Delaware - but not through the toll plaza. Those parasites aren't getting any more of my money."
To be fair to Delaware they run one excellent modern tollroad the State Route One tollroad. But the one that Marylanders and other nondelarwarians know is the Delaware Turnpike I-95, and even this tollroad enthusiast has to concede, it stinks. At its southern end there's the antiquated cobbled-together mainline toll plaza with all stop-to-pay toll lanes in a staggered arrangement which is notorious for backups that keep people waiting for an hour or more to pay the $4 toll. If people's time is worth $10 an hour then the hour's delay will generate a lot more sense of cost than
the toll itself.
At its northern end - the toll-free portion - the Delaware Turnpike is plain overloaded especially southbound where three lanes of I-95 from Philadelphia merge with three lanes of I-295 from the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the New Jersey Turnpike into four lanes. In addition local interchanges cause heavy weaving movements that disrupt flow.
They are working on this adding fifth travel lanes and improving the interchanges especially at DE1.
The inherent complexity and multiplicity of close spaced ramps has to make you skeptical about the end result but at least the effort is being made and some relief is on its way. At the southern end at the mainline toll plaza however nothing's happening. There's a plan for open road tolling through the middle and cash on the sides but the project is close to $100m, they say, and they don't want to
spend it. It's only used by those-out-of-staters, you see.
You do have options
The complaint is often made that there's no alternative to the tollroad, that it's got a monopoly. The bright side of all this is motorists do have options. The various Delaware Avoidance Routes show that. If the service degenerates and the tolls soar, Delaware style, people will find another way.
TOLROADSnews 2007-11-14
Tollers watch out for this Mike Dresser guy. He's always advertising ways for your customers to avoid the toll route. If your revenues are dipping consider checking if the customers are taking a Dresserway instead of the tollway. With his Here's-how-to-avoid-the-toll pieces, the traffic correspondent of the Baltimore Sun is tapping into a deep well of frustration among many of his readers. Much of it focuses on Delaware. Dresser has various names for his mission to help his readers avoid the Delaware tolls and notorious Delaware Turnpike
backups:- the Search for the proverbial Northeast Passage
- the I-95 End Run
- the Delaware Avoidance Route
His latest enterprise (Baltimore Sun 2007-11-12) produces a Baltimore-Northern New Jersey route that is a mix of toll-free interstates and US routes, mostly through eastern Pennsylvania:
- I-83 to York
- US30 to Lancaster
- US283 then US222 to Reading and Allentown
- some wild maneuverings around Allentown, PA100 or 863 to avoid I-78 congestion
- I-78 and I-287 in northern New Jersey
Dresser claims this route can be traveled in 3hrs 45mins in times of even the heaviest traffic as compared to five hours for MD/DE/NJ/I-95, the turnpikes route. He claims that he timed his travel on his latest Delaware Avoidance Route and that a Rutgers university student had volunteered to travel the turnpikes route.Dresser writes: "And where she paid $10.55 in tolls and endured multiple backups, I paid none and had clear sailing most of the way."
He claims it would work just as well the other way - southbound.
Dresser makes one mistake. The southbound route isn't strictly toll free. The Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC) has a toll westbound on I-78 at the Delaware River that affects his southbound route. But far cars it's a fiddly little toll - 75c cash 60c E-ZPass. (Why does anyone bother collecting a toll less than a dollar nowadays?)
Trucks by comparison get socked at the Delaware River. The truck tolls are 2-axles $5.00 cash/$4.75 E-ZPass, and 5 axles $16.25 cash, $15.44 E-ZPass peak, $13.81 E-ZPass offpeak. That car/truck differential suggests a heavy dose of politics is afflicting toll rate setting at the DRJTBC.
[For the geographically confused the Delaware River here has nothing to do with the state of Delaware. In this white water section it is the boundary between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Delaware, the state, is way down river on the south side of the tidal portion.]
Washington DC to Northern NJ DAR
Washington DC to northern NJ offers a near expressway standard Delaware Avoidance Route that is something of a variant to Dresser's route for Baltimoreans. It goes:
- I-270 to Frederick
- US-15 to Harrisburg
- I-81 north of Harrisburg
- I-78 joining Dresser's route in Allentown PA and in to Jersey
This is my favorite route to northern NJ/NY during peak hours in Baltimore or the Philly areas. Getting through Harrisburg and making the US15/I-81 connection can be tricky the first couple of times but the best route is to do a short hop of two legs east
on the Penn Pike, get off at the High Spire toll plaza I-283, wave to Joe Brimmeier and buddies in their executive suite in the glassy extension of the Pike's head offices nearby, proceed north on I-283/I-83 to I-81. I-81 around Harrisburg is ridiculously narrow at just 3+3 lanes between the Turnpike and Harrisburg and 2+2 lanes Harrisburg east to I-78. On this 56km (35 mile) stretch it is carrying both north-south and east-west traffic, plus a good deal of local Harrisburg area traffic. This stretch should have been cosigned I-81/I-78. More important than signing its traffic volumes warrant 4+4 lanes. Given the truck volumes of over 12k/day it would justify truck-only lanes.
(We can't give you any actual traffic counts though our iimpression is they must be AADTs of 100k+. PennDOT's traffic data files are in xml code which in MS Excel generates a message that "The file you are trying to open is not a valid Excel XML Spreadsheet." http://www.pasda.psu.edu/uci/MetadataDisplay.aspx?entry=PASDA&file=patrafficcounts2007.xml&dataset=56)
PennDOT actually rebuilt the stretch of I-81 north of Harrisburg to I-78 about four years ago. But they incompetently rebuilt it to the exact same 2 lanes each direction. This bottleneck is most serious southbound because four lanes (2 of I-81 and 2 of I-78) merge suddenly into those two lanes south or west toward Harrisburg. That one act of stupidity by PennDOT engineers regularly has westbound I-78 traffic backed up all the way east into New Jersey and I-81 traffic southbound backed up north
to Hazelton. We've been stuck there twice and the backups are Delawarian in scale. It's enough to drive you back to I-95 southbound, Delaware Turnpike and all.
But Dresser has us thinking that it may be worth taking part of his southbound route back to Frederick and Washington DC, getting off I-78 at Allentown to avoid Harrisburg, going US222 through Reading and Lancaster onto US30 through York to Gettysburg then south on US15. That would be a southern bypass of the horrendous I-81/I-78 double lane drop bottleneck.
York to Gettysburg on US30 is very tedious 2 lane stuff but almost all the rest is 2+2 lanes and a good bit of it is now expressway standard. [Dresser has one weird term in his piece. He calls expressways "closed access." That's absurd. If a road has access closed you could get on it, or off it. He meant to write controlled access.]
Dresser concedes that out of peak times the turnpikes route on I-95 is the quicker one but adds: "At 3am, even I would go through Delaware - but not through the toll plaza. Those parasites aren't getting any more of my money."
To be fair to Delaware they run one excellent modern tollroad the State Route One tollroad. But the one that Marylanders and other nondelarwarians know is the Delaware Turnpike I-95, and even this tollroad enthusiast has to concede, it stinks. At its southern end there's the antiquated cobbled-together mainline toll plaza with all stop-to-pay toll lanes in a staggered arrangement which is notorious for backups that keep people waiting for an hour or more to pay the $4 toll. If people's time is worth $10 an hour then the hour's delay will generate a lot more sense of cost than
the toll itself. At its northern end - the toll-free portion - the Delaware Turnpike is plain overloaded especially southbound where three lanes of I-95 from Philadelphia merge with three lanes of I-295 from the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the New Jersey Turnpike into four lanes. In addition local interchanges cause heavy weaving movements that disrupt flow.
They are working on this adding fifth travel lanes and improving the interchanges especially at DE1.
The inherent complexity and multiplicity of close spaced ramps has to make you skeptical about the end result but at least the effort is being made and some relief is on its way. At the southern end at the mainline toll plaza however nothing's happening. There's a plan for open road tolling through the middle and cash on the sides but the project is close to $100m, they say, and they don't want to
spend it. It's only used by those-out-of-staters, you see. You do have options
The complaint is often made that there's no alternative to the tollroad, that it's got a monopoly. The bright side of all this is motorists do have options. The various Delaware Avoidance Routes show that. If the service degenerates and the tolls soar, Delaware style, people will find another way.
TOLROADSnews 2007-11-14