Drivers beware: I-95 likely a holiday travel nightmare

Another holiday, another traffic nightmare on I-95.That's the warning travel authorities are sending to Christmas drivers, who could find themselves stuck in the same kinds of backups that made Thanksgiving a headache for hundreds of thousands of travelers on I-95 through Delaware.

The I-95 toll plaza near Newark, Del. is still under reconstruction, so there are fewer lanes to handle the crush of holiday traffic, which AAA Mid-Atlantic predicts will be greater than last year. That, the Delaware Department of Transportation said in a statement this week, means delays "could stretch for miles and take hours to clear."

While the whole I-95 corridor, especially around Washington, D.C., will see heavy holiday traffic, the toll plaza project will make Delaware one of the worst stretches of the highway that runs between Maine and Florida, AAA-Mid Atlantic spokesman Jim Lardear says.

Combined with some of the region's highest per-mile toll rates, the congestion in Delaware angers people such as Greg Cohen, president of the American Highway Users Alliance, a non-profit group based in Washington, D.C., that pushes for safe and uncongested highways.

"It's frustrating for people from out of state to pay these tolls year after year and then sit in traffic year after year," Cohen said.

Delaware has a bad reputation among many out-of-state travelers because of its congestion and high toll, Cohen said. Delaware's charge of $4 each way for passenger vehicles is the second highest per-mile toll on I-95. Only the New Jersey-New York section, which includes an $8 toll to cross the George Washington Bridge, has a higher per-mile toll. There are no tolls on I-95 south of Baltimore all the way to Miami.

DelDOT collected $117.2 million in I-95 tolls last year, the agency says."Most of the locals know to avoid that interchange," Lardear said. But out-of-state travelers "don't know the way around it, so they get stuck in it."

Alternate routes such as U.S. 40, U.S. 1 and U.S. 301 aren't designed to handle the 73,000 vehicles that pass through the toll plaza daily, let alone the 130,000 vehicles typical for a peak travel day, Lardear said.

DelDOT says the toll plaza reconstruction project will help alleviate the kind of congestion it has been causing lately. There are two high-speed E-ZPass lanes and seven cash lanes in each direction. The project is expected to be finished in summer 2011.

Nationwide, 92.3 million Americans are expected to travel from Dec. 23 to Jan. 2, an increase of 3.1% from last year, AAA reports. Nearly all of those travelers — 93% nationwide — are expected to go by car.

Chalmers reports for The News Journal in Wilmington, Del.

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