The New York Times
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I-95, a River of Commerce Overflowing With Traffic

By RANDY KENNEDY

December 29, 2000

Every weekday before sunrise, Dick Chartier buckles himself into a mud-brown United Parcel Service truck outside Providence, R.I. He dangles a balsam-fir air freshener from the dashboard. He secures his provisions: turkey sandwich, apple, bottle of juice. He drapes his coat on the seat, settles behind the wheel and steels himself to stay there for a long, long time. He always does.

"This is my living room," Mr. Chartier says. "For 10 hours every day." Or 11. Or 12. Or longer, if there is rain or road work or, God forbid, even a minor accident ahead of him. In snow, the round- trip drive from Warwick, R.I., to Secaucus, N.J., has taken 17 hours. The cab of his tractor-trailer has doubled as his bedroom.

This is because, for the last two years, Mr. Chartier and his Ford rig have elbowed their way down the busiest stretch of what traffic experts say is the busiest, most overburdened and, in most parts, least attractive highway in the nation, Interstate 95.

Between Maine and Virginia alone, the interstate cuts through a commercial corridor containing almost a quarter of the American population. It is the major highway feeding 13 major airports, 11 major seaports, and more than two dozen railroad stations. It is surrounded by 30,000 miles of other busy roads that all flow, one way or another, into I-95, which has become the Mississippi, the Nile and the Euphrates of the East Coast, rolled into one.

And in many places, this asphalt river is overflowing. At the notorious portion south of Washington known as the Mixing Bowl, where I-95 intersects with the Capital Beltway, as many as 400,000 vehicles — roughly as many cars as there are people in Atlanta — crowd through the interchange every day. Traffic engineers call it the largest highway interchange in the world.

Just up the road, where the interstate crosses the Potomac River, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge is designed to carry 75,000 vehicles a day. It is now deteriorating under the pressure of 190,000 a day.

In Delaware, where holiday standstills can stretch more than five miles, tollkeepers set up "bucket lanes" in which highway employees tote plastic toll buckets from car to car because the cash tollbooths are swamped.

At the northbound rest stop near Darien, Conn., near a McDonald's that is among the busiest McDonald's franchises in the country, the stackup of tractor-trailers is so immense that the town's top official, worried about a possible pileup or explosion, has asked the governor to impose a limit on the number of truckers who can pull over there for the bathroom or a burger.

The Connecticut transportation commissioner was candid about the traffic on the state's 118-mile share of I-95, which often resembles a huge parking lot: "It's way beyond what anyone ever envisioned when the road was designed and built."

The statement was sobering. It was also made back in 1985, when an average of 80,000 vehicles a day passed one of Connecticut's busiest points, near Greenwich. Last year, the daily count there was 130,000 vehicles. By the year 2020, it will probably rise to 172,000, about three times as many vehicles as there are residents today in Greenwich.

Not surprisingly, I-95 can also be a deadly line down the country's right side. More than 3,000 people have died on the highway in the last decade, with Florida consistently producing the most fatalities.

Even a small accident on a highway so busy can tie up traffic for miles. Major accidents — the collapse of a bridge in southern Connecticut, a tire fire that weakened an overpass near Philadelphia in 1996 — can tangle traffic and commerce throughout an entire region for weeks.

The interstate was born in disjointed pieces in the late 1950's and completed in 1987 as an almost continuous 1,900-mile connection between Florida and Maine.

It has never been romanticized or doted over like its quaint East Coast sister, U.S. 1, which runs alongside the interstate for much of its length. It is unlikely that anyone will ever care to preserve a piece of I-95 for a museum, as the Smithsonian Institution did this year with a stretch of the old Route 66.

It does not inspire the kind of hatred among truckers that Interstate 40 does as it crumbles its way across Arkansas. It is not as thoroughly jammed as spots on the dreaded San Diego Freeway in Los Angeles or the Southwest Freeway in Houston.

But as the primary artery through the Northeast, the country's financial heart, and as the only major highway linking the states of the Eastern Seaboard, I-95 is arguably the most exasperating and essential highway in the nation. It has also become a kind of nation of its own, one where the uniformity of the gas stations, fast-food chains and floodlighted rest stops makes it difficult to discern, after a day on the road, whether you are in New Hampshire or North Carolina, Maine or Maryland.

It is a nation with its own semi-permanent citizenry, of interstate truckers and intrastate commuters, a population that orders its lives and its livelihood almost exclusively around one span of asphalt. This population is growing steadily. And that is never more apparent than during a week like this one, when hundreds of thousands of extended families stage their sad annual holiday competition to see which can get stuck in traffic the longest.

Over the last decade, surveying the growing numbers, state highway officials have started to realize that it is all but futile to try to build their way out of the problem. The only way to keep it from getting worse, they say, is to transform the culture of highway transportation itself, to convince people that driving on the interstate is not always the best way to get from state to state.

In fact, it can often be the worst way.

But Mr. Chartier, the U.P.S. trucker, like hundreds of thousands of drivers around him every year, has no choice. And so he perseveres. He knows his share of the interstate the way he knows his own front yard. So he knows, for example, that as certainly as the sun will come up, he will hit his first traffic jam every morning just east of Branford, Conn. The backup will last for 40 miles, until Stamford or about 9:30 a.m., whichever comes first. His left leg will wear out from working the clutch.

He could get angry about this, he says. But it would do him as much good as getting angry about the law of gravity.

"The first few months I drove this," he said the other day, crawling through Branford, "it really worked my nerves. I was thinking, `Jeez, how am I going to make my time with all of this traffic?' But they really don't say much when you're late. I mean, what can they say?

"They could put wings and a propeller on the truck, I guess," he added.

Visions of a Superhighway

The nightmare of traffic jams and the dream of superhighways to make them go away have been around almost as long as the car itself. In 1937, during a meeting at the White House, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sketched six lines across a United States map, three east to west and three north to south, envisioning a network of interstate toll roads that were never built.

State officials in the Northeast, where traffic problems first developed, banded together to try to create their own version of interstates long before Congress signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956 to build them.

In 1942, the state officials petitioned, without success, to get federal help for a superhighway to be called the 7-State Highway, through Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, says Larry Larned, a former highway engineer and road historian for the Connecticut Department of Transportation. Except for Rhode Island, the 7-State Highway would have run through the same states that I-95 does now.

Mr. Larned — who almost died working to build I-95, plunging into a frozen river in 1962 while surveying in Connecticut — points out that what drivers now know as I- 95 was originally just new signs posted on highways that Northeastern states had already built to ease congestion: the New Jersey Turnpike, the New England Thruway, the Connecticut Turnpike.

"The number really came fairly late in the game," Mr. Larned says. "And that's one of the confusing aspects of the road."

Or at least it helps explain some of the confusing aspects of the road. Such as why I- 95 does not actually run uninterrupted from Maine to Florida, but disappears in New Jersey, quietly morphing into the plain old New Jersey Turnpike after Exit 10 south and not reappearing until Delaware, except for a stray strand in Pennsylvania. (This is because residents of Somerset and Mercer Counties in New Jersey fought a plan for the interstate to branch off from the turnpike and run through their communities. The plan, finally scrapped in 1983, exists only as a dotted line on old state maps.)

Or why, for example, the highway takes a detour around Boston instead of going through it. (Fierce opposition in the late 1960's to building the highway through residential neighborhoods.)

The entire highway, now longer than the Great Wall of China, was supposed to have been completed by 1972. But it was not finished until 1987, when the last 33.8-mile stretch was opened in Florida between St. Lucie and Palm Beach Counties.

During the years that Florida residents and officials fought over whether to finish the link, a disconnected stretch that had already been built attracted traffic nonetheless: it became a popular landing strip for cocaine smugglers.

During its history, I-95 has been known by several nicknames. State troopers once referred to parts of it as Cocaine Lane because drug traffickers seemed to use it as often as truckers in many states. Other stretches, mostly in the South, have been called Iron Road by law enforcement officers because the highway is a favorite route for the transport of illegal guns.

Probably the least fitting nickname was the one applied to the Connecticut Turnpike portion of the interstate when it was first built, the Ribbon of Hope, because many Connecticut residents saw the road as a thoroughfare to new economic prosperity.

Now, of course, there are those in the state who move their businesses to get away from the highway. Like Laszlo Birinyi, who runs a stock market research firm. Two years ago, Mr. Birinyi moved his office from Greenwich to Westport, near his home, in part because of the congestion and frustrations he suffered on his commute.

"In Greenwich," he says, "you never schedule a meeting at 4 o'clock because it will always be over at 5 — so people can try to beat the rush. If you don't get out by 5, you wait until after 8.

"The highway weighs heavily on your life," he says.

Culture of Congestion

Especially these days, the highway also shapes people's lives, creating a kind of congestion culture. It forges floating communities that are borne of the necessity of being on — usually stuck on — the interstate.

Every morning, Mr. Chartier, 58, pulls his U.P.S. truck over at the Exit 53 southbound rest stop near Branford, because that is where the backup begins. He waves to the Seventh-day Adventists who are proselytizing in the parking lot.

"When the traffic eases up here, they move up to the next rest stop to follow the crowd," he says.

He may spot a bedraggled woman or two, the rest-stop prostitutes whom truckers call "lot lizards." He always gets his coffee at the McDonald's, and it is always waiting on the counter for him by the time he emerges from the bathroom. He says hello to Gladys, one of the managers. She talks about growing up in South Africa; he talks about growing up in Rhode Island. Outside the window, the bumper-to-bumper traffic oozes by.

On a highway whose chief aesthetic feature is its featurelessness, drivers seem to long for any signs of life beyond the breakdown lane. They have, for example, formed almost emotional attachments to a 14-foot- high white marble statue of the Virgin Mary that stands near the northbound side of the highway in Childs, Md. The statue, called Our Lady of the Highways, was built in the early 1970's by the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales in memory of three victims of a 1968 pileup.

The Rev. Richard R. DeLillio, the development director for the Roman Catholic order, says that truckers sometimes call the priests in a nearby retreat center to tell them that the spotlight that illuminates the statue at night has burned out. "They'll say, `Hey, you'd better change the bulbs, Father. We couldn't see the Stone Lady tonight.'

"People count on it," Father DeLillio says.

But loneliness is usually a distant second to anger as the most prevalent emotion on the road. A few miles north of the shrine, at a cluster of tollbooths on the Delaware Turnpike, Tracy Maguire says she sometimes feels as if drivers view her and her fellow tollkeepers as the personification of the highway's problems.

"I've had people throw money at me as they go through," Ms. Maguire, 30, says. "Had people call me all kinds of names.

"Some people in the booths have been brought to tears," she adds. "It happens when it's real busy out here. But I've never cried. I'm not going to let anybody make me cry." In fact, she has become the cheerleader of the 3-to-11 p.m. shift. "I tell people, `Hey, shake it off. You're better than they are and you know it.' "

And a little stubborn cheerfulness, in the face of so much frustration, makes some friends. An Utz driver will hand down a few bags of sourdough pretzels as he passes. A Wonder Bread driver will do the same with loaves of bread. Around the holidays, the truckers present Ms. Maguire with bouquets of flowers or Christmas bags filled with candy. ("You don't eat the candy," she says. "I just have a rule against that.")

After two years in the booth, Ms. Maguire still finds it hard to believe the amount of traffic at her left elbow every day.

"Sometimes I'll say to people, `Don't you have homes? Go home. Watch a video. Get off the turnpike, for God's sake.' "

One Solution: Stay Away

To many drivers who inch down I-95, it often seems as if the highway was built long ago and then largely left to its own devices, save for the state troopers who hand out tickets and the construction crews.

But over the last several years, highway officials along the northern third of the highway, where traffic problems have become most severe, have realized that "rather than just building and maintaining it, we all have to start thinking about managing it as a 7-day-a-week, 24-hour operation, like a company or a factory," says John J. Baniak, executive director of the I-95 Corridor Coalition.

The coalition, which represents a dozen states and the District of Columbia, was formed in 1993 to address the severe congestion and the kinds of major accidents that can paralyze whole states. People in the coalition talk very little about highway construction. When they do, they seem to suggest that building extra lanes will never be more than a temporary solution.

"We've done a great job of building the interstate highway system," Mr. Baniak says. "It's really a modern wonder. But it really is reaching a kind of saturation point."

Instead, traffic strategists have decided to concentrate on two almost stunningly straightforward jobs. One is finding quicker and more effective ways to clear obstructions from the interstate, like stalled cars, wrecks, debris and construction work, so that every inch of existing asphalt is used.

The second job is more important and more difficult: basically, persuading drivers to stay away from I-95, mostly by giving them more accurate, prompt news, nearly all of it bad, about accidents, construction and rush-hour traffic jams.

Over the last few years, several states have created elaborate traffic management centers that are open 24 hours, helping state troopers, dispatching roadside aid trucks and conveying information to drivers through electronic road signs and highway radio channels. The traffic centers resemble miniature NASA control rooms, filled with officials who monitor radar screens, computers and banks of television sets that tell them, second by second, what is happening along the highway.

Spending a weekday morning inside Connecticut's traffic control center in Bridgeport is like sitting in the cockpit of a giant airplane that the pilots can do very little to steer. It is to see at the same time how sophisticated traffic management has become and exactly how hard it is to make a difference.

On a recent Tuesday, at 6:38 a.m., a traffic coordinator named Robert Didato scanned the television screens that flash images from more than 90 cameras along I- 95 in Connecticut. What he saw was what he usually sees around that time: fields of brake lights stretching on endlessly south in the pre-dawn darkness.

He activated a warning that would soon be flashing in yellow on several electronic highway signs, one that he or someone in the control center activates almost every weekday morning now: rush hour, 20 mi. delay, Exits 27-9.

"Usually on Mondays, the delays start at around 6 in the morning," Mr. Didato said. "This is a little early for a Tuesday."

He settled in with his colleagues for a busy morning. The rush does not usually ebb until after 9 a.m. these days. Sometimes, he said, it has lasted as late as 10:30. And on Fridays, the afternoon rush can begin as early as noon.

"Believe me, it takes almost nothing to completely screw things up out there," he said.

Shaking his head and smiling, Mr. Didato added: "They keep coming. They see those signs every morning. Every morning the signs say the same thing. But they just keep on coming anyway."