Route 322 Blues
I hope that all of you had as great a weekend as I did. I know the rain might have spoiled some plans, but I still managed to have some fun. I love going back to Penn State, and I especially love going back to Penn State when the football team is playing well.
What I don’t love about going back to Penn State on football weekends is driving there and driving back. The drive itself snakes along beside the Juniata River and is actually quite beautiful. The traffic is physically painful.
When PennDOT completed the Lewistown narrows project on Route 322 it helped and I rejoiced, but this weekend, the good old Department of Transportation disappointed me a little bit. The only reason I’m even bothering to write about this is because I doubt I’m the only one who has ever been stuck in awful traffic in one lane when it seems like both lanes could probably be open.
Route 322 gets heavy traffic about 20 times a year. Home football games, State College Artsfest, Penn State move-in day, Penn State move-out week and the days directly before major university holidays. Saturday’s home game against Illinois was ostensibly one of the biggest football games of the year and therefore one of the heaviest traffic days for 322. Nevertheless, between Mifflintown and Lewistown, PennDOT had traffic restricted to one lane. It was due to the final stages of a paving project that began on May 12.
I don’t understand why the State’s contract with Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc. didn’t stipulate that the work had to be finished before the first home football game of the season. Either way though, things happen. Whatever. What really bothered me, was that the work was done and yet cones still blocked a lane of highway perfectly ready to handle traffic in each direction and caused serious delays.
I called PennDOT’s press office and press officer Marla Fannin told me that the work would be completed this week, and the lanes would re-open by Friday weather permitting. I asked whether PennDOT took high-volume traffic days (like football games) into account when planning projects and why the cones hadn’t been removed since the road was ready to be used.
“We certainly do,” she said. “A lot of times what happens is that it’s more cost effective to keep a traffic pattern in place than to pull it down and put it back up,”
Oh. I wonder how long it takes to move two miles of cones off to the side of the road. I’d be happy to do it for $100 a mile.
“If you are familiar with the Lewistown narrows project, when that was under construction if we had that kind of pattern in place east of the narrows, typically we did everything we could to clear that out,” Fannin said. “The difference is this year, now that we have all four lanes, if we need to keep that traffic pattern in place over the weekend we can afford to do that.”
I suppose that’s the way things go. Since I had such a good weekend, I can swallow a small lack of common sense. Now ask Dori how she feels about Comcast cutting into the fourth quarter of the Eagles game last night for a test of the Emergency Broadcast System…
5 comments so far. Sweet.
Left Harrisburg for the game at 2:30. Experience ZERO traffic. (really. ZERO TRAFFIC). Parked in my reserved space at 4:00 with four hours to tailgate before kickoff.
Re: Comcast coincidentally running a "mandatory emergency broadcast test" of disputable veracity that started exactly as the Eagles were attempting their last, and potentially game-winning, play last night at 11:47 ... I called Comcast and was told that only the FCC can schedule said tests and that they are at the mercy of the FCC to run them as scheduled. Thing is, it looked like a hack job, timed perfectly to "F" with people, not the standard 60-second or 30-second interruption with "this is only a test, if this had been an actual emergency" verbiage. The programming was hacked and I want someone to own up to it. We should all get free cable for the day for the breach of service. Who's with me?
Hey, I'm glad you had an easy run of it. Night games space the traffic out because people come all throughout the day. I went up early Saturday morning and had no problems either. It was Sunday at about 11:00am, when everyone who had stuck around after the game was heading home, that I got stuck.
A friend of mine that lives in York didn't get home until 5am Sunday when he left right after the game. He said he sat in traffic for hours, watching The Lord of the Rings on the flip-down DVD player inside the car in front of him.
Thanks for giving me an idea, Katie. I'll tell my friends who'll be watching the game next time not to forget to bring DVDs for the traffic. Lol -M from Mexico