Soccer Dad

The evil state of delaware

On our way home from New Jersey on Sunday night, the traffic wasn't bad. We hit some traffic as the two legs of the New Jersey Turnpike merged so I moved over to 295 South. The traffic in Maryland was clear. Did I miss something? Yes I did, I missed Delaware. After the Delaware Memorial Bridge the traffic moved well until Routes 95, 295 and 495 merged. Oh there was some warning. One of those overhead traffic signs warned of congestion. That congestion lasted from the merge until the toll plaza some ten miles later.

The Delaware Turnpike, on both its north and south sides, has awful tolll plazas. The plazas have EZ-Pass lanes available at the extremes and advertises them. (Other lanes may be EZ-Pass accessible but the Turnpike authority only promotes the lanes at the extreme left and right. This leads drivers to switch to those lanes. If the traffic is heavy it leads to massive slowdowns like what we experienced Sunday night. For an extra hour and fifteen minutes we traveled at 5 to 10 miles and hour sitting in a needless delay.

Why do I blame the Delaware Turnpike's toll plaza for this unfortunate series of events? Because the remainder of the roads were free from traffic. The only reason there was a backup was the poor design of the Delaware Turnpike's southern toll plaza. There was no backup approaching the generous toll plaza at the end of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. There was no back up in Maryland. And even though we got off the New Jersey Turnpike, there are places where 295 passes close to it, and again, the NJ Turnpike, except apparently where its two legs merged was clear.

So it must be that the awful jam on the Delaware Turnpike was the result of high volume compounded by the poor design of the toll plaza at its end that reduced the flow to a stop and go. And my family and I were forced to spend an extra 75 minutes in Delaware for no good reason.

The state is evil.

UPDATE: As the comment below makes clear, I didn't really explain my frustration adequately. Assume that a car takes up 25 feet. That means that there are ~211 cars per mile. Multiply that by 4 lanes and 10 miles and you have 8448 cars over a ten mile stretch. It took 75 minutes extra, so let's multiply 8448 by 1.25 and you get 10560. Divide by 24 and you get that the people in those 8448 cars (assuming at least one occupant per car) cumulatively wasted 440 days due to Delaware's poor traffic engineering. Now that 440 days is a rough estimate of the minimum amount of time wasted. Obviously it was more than that. But short of producing a Tom Cruise movie there are few endeavors that can lead to such a great waste of time.