Posted on 01/14/2019 11:01:51 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
By the time the I-95 reconstruction is complete, youll probably be too old to have to worry about a commute.
The same goes for the planners, engineers, managers, and laborers who for more than a decade have worked to rebuild the highways 51 miles in Pennsylvania from the ground up. Their careers at PennDot or with contractors will almost surely end before construction does.
I dont know that I think about too much that Im not going to be here, said Elaine Elbich, PennDots portfolio manager for the I-95 project.
Elbich plans with a span of decades in mind. From PennDots regional office in King of Prussia, she looks at maps showing the highways path from Delaware County to Bucks and can identify what will be finished in the 2020s, the 2030s, and beyond.
The Curious Philly portal invites readers to ask the Inquirer questions about the city and region; one reader wondered how much longer highway construction would last. That person, and the many others who face diversions and delays because of the project, should not expect relief any time soon.
The portion of the road under construction now, from Cottman Avenue to the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, wont be finished for another nine or 10 years, and thats just one of four segments to be rebuilt.
The project has prompted complaints, especially when traffic patterns shift to make room for construction. Officials hope, though, that drivers recognize the need.
I think people understand, said Leslie Richards, Pennsylvanias transportation secretary. Theyve been driving over it, and they knew it needed some work.
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
DANG!
This sounds like one of those empty cities in China, built but never meant to be occupied. Built just to provide long term employment to several thousand people, and bragging rights for the politicians who made it all happen.
This is Pennsylvania.
I live here.
Union workers need jobs for a lifetime.
Looks like they’re getting it.
202, 476, and 95 are under perpetual construction.
The original 180 miles of the Penn Tpke, from Carlisle to Butler was completed in just over 2 years. Not just making some of the deepest cuts east of the Rockies through the Alleghenys Mtns, but of the original 7 Tpke tunnels, 4 were part of a bankrupt, abandoned RR built by Cornelius Vanderbilt in the 1880’s that were refurbished and stabilized, the rest were were all new construction. And it was one of the few gov’t projects that was completed ahead of schedule and UNDER BUDGET. An amazing feat considering the technology available in the 1930’s. I see the same thing here in FL. Relatively simple road widening projects taking years to complete, as if the workers and engineers are making carreers out of them.
And thusly why i want the Army Engineers building our border barrier instead.
H-3 in Ohau from Honolulu to Kaneohe Bay is believed to be the most expensive Interstate Highway ever built, on a cost per mile basis. Its final cost was $1.3 billion, or approximately $80 million per mile.
When it first hit the drawing boards in 1963, the estimated cost of the 16-mile H-3 freeway was $50 million to $70 million. The scheduled completion date was 1972. When completed in June, 1997, it will have cost $1.3 billion.
You left out 422!
Please turn the construction over to the Taiwanese. They completed a major subway system underground in Taipei in 3 yrs on a 4 yr plan and under budget. A few ceiling tiles fell on in an 8.2 earthquake.
I have seen it and am amazed at the quality of workmanship involved.
They should tear it all down and tell the people to use mass transportation (as they call it in the Northeast). Then Global Warming will end and we will be in peace and love with nature.
The construction on I-95 will NEVER EVER be complete.
That’s why the traffic cone is Pennsylvania’s state tree.
Kind of like I-75 going through Cincinnati....been under construction for over 30 years and never seems to change....
Two decades ago, I dated a woman whose father was one of the original contractors on the Interstate system. According to him, as she told it, the Interstates were designed to be continuously rebuilt, to keep them up to current and future standards. They were NOT designed to be or become commuter roads to funnel workers from suburbs to urban centers and back twice a day.
76 in Stuart, FL just off i-95 is a joke, they been working on it for over 10 years and it still has cones and 3 lanes to two. somebody is making big bucks off of this work.
I refuse to go on 422. Its a good place to die. That and the Sure Kill Hwy...
Unions like perpetual construction.
Union motto: The longer you take, the more you make.
It’s like they want to PUNISH drivers who don’t use the toll road. In New Jersey they literally doubled the capacity of the Turnpike in about 5 years. They had to build new bridges everywhere bridges existed (probably around 100, and these were SERIOUS bridges). They didn’t ‘start at the north, and work south’ over several millennia, they built ALL of the new bridges at the same time, and then connected up everything, all at the same time.
What the hell is so hard about doing things that way?
Impala64ssa said...”The original 180 miles of the Penn Tpke, from Carlisle to Butler was completed in just over 2 years......”
Up here in Carbon County PA the world famous Delaware and Lehigh Trail (D&L) 140+ miles runs through our area. From Lehighton to Jim Thorpe the trail uses the old Lehigh Canal towpath. The trail abruptly ends at the waste water plant in Jim Thorpe, the D&L continues on the opposite side of the Lehigh River through the scenic Lehigh Gorge State Park for another 26 miles. Thus there is a gap of about a mile between the Canal and the Gorge which if closed would make the trail roughly 60 miles long with no interruptions. It would also put a lot of adventure seekers from New York City with spending money right into the downtown of Jim Thorpe. As a point of information, anyone using the trail looking to travel through this gap needs to be shuttled the approx. 4 miles from Lehighton to the Gorge as there isn’t a viable route between the two points for use by bicyclists.
So the County Supervisors applied and received a bunch of grants to construct a bridge over the river to connect the two trails. The actual span (250 feet) is in place at a cost of 3.1 million dollars. The awesome bridge is also closed because they want to make some improvements to the water treatment plant and install a sea wall to abate flooding. Nothing was said about this work until a month or so before the dedication of the bridge span.
When ground was broken on the bridge, the project was already almost 2 years behind schedule. Ground breaking was I think in March 2017, the dedication was June 2018. No one is stating when the bridge will actually open for use by the public although the D&L would like us to believe that it will open in the Spring (2019). The earliest in my opinion is 4th quarter 2019 and I’m a optimist. The trail improvements and sea wall cost is another 1 million dollars making the total cost 4.3 million.
There is another problem in that on the side of the river opposite of the water plant the D&L trail will traverse a large parking lot owned by the county. There is another half million dollars of grant money in the bank to improve the trail in the parking lot but there are other projects in the pipeline that will push the completion date of that part of the trail well into 2021. So in summary the bridge is 2 million dollars over budget and as we speak 2 years behind schedule, will be between 3 or 4 years behind schedule when it is finally complete.
There is of course a reason for this story telling. The bridge is located right at the exact point where the historical Lehigh Canal had it start point. About 500 feet from the bridge are the remains of lock #1 and they had demolish part of the old slack water dam to build the eastern abutment. The irony here is that the original canal from (present day) Jim Thorpe to Easton PA (45 miles) was built in two years between 1818 and 1820 with picks and shovels at a cost of <7 million dollars. A single modern foot bridge 200 years later using cranes and bulldozers will take twice the amount of time to construct and when it’s all said and done cost almost the same amount of money.
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