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After 60 Years, 1,900-Mile-Long Interstate 95 Is Almost Finished (bloomberg.com)
"It has taken 60 years, but a small, strange gap in Interstate-95 is being filled," writes Slashdot reader McGruber. Bloomberg reports: Near the Pennsylvania border, drivers have long been forced off the interstate and onto other roadways, only to join back 8 miles away. Transportation officials and civil engineers spent more than two decades and $425 million to eliminate this detour off I-95, the most traveled highway in America, spanning 1,900 miles from Miami to Maine.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, which oversees the I-95 Interchange Project, said the new infrastructure -- which includes the creation of flyover ramps, toll plaza facilities, environmental mitigation sites, intersections, six overhead bridges, widened highways and new connections to the New Jersey and Pennsylvania turnpikes -- will be open to the public by Sept. 24. "The benefit of completing this 'missing link' is mobility," said Carl DeFebo, the director of public relations at the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission. The new infrastructure will reduce traffic time for north- and south-bound travelers and ease congestion on local roads that used to connect I-95 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, which oversees the I-95 Interchange Project, said the new infrastructure -- which includes the creation of flyover ramps, toll plaza facilities, environmental mitigation sites, intersections, six overhead bridges, widened highways and new connections to the New Jersey and Pennsylvania turnpikes -- will be open to the public by Sept. 24. "The benefit of completing this 'missing link' is mobility," said Carl DeFebo, the director of public relations at the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission. The new infrastructure will reduce traffic time for north- and south-bound travelers and ease congestion on local roads that used to connect I-95 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
You might have gone up the NJ Turnpike instead. That's the better route. It's is labeled 95 in its northern parts, but down near Philly, The NJT is in NJ and 95 is on the PA side along the east side of Philly.
That's probably because you assumed that I-95 followed the entire length of the NJ Turnpike - which pretty much everyone has assumed all along. But no, I-95 runs down the Turnpike from NYC and then mysteriously stops being signed as such around Exit 9, even though there was no applicable interchange involved. Then the NJ Turnpike ends at the bridge into Delaware, where it meets up with the stub of I-95 that goes through Philadelphia and also mysteriously starts being signed as I-295 after crossing into NJ. Anyone going from NYC to DC would be going out of their way to turn off onto this new alignment (using the existing PA Turnpike and using a new interchange to connect to the stub) and add another city (Philadelphia) to drive through. PA is not even a coastal state, so there's no logical reason for I-95 to run through it in the first place - other than politics.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."