Boston Trip Part 3: The Journey to the Land of Potholes

I was originally going to call this post The Journey to the Land of Sports Teams of which I Am Not a Fan, but I decided that I didn't really have anything against the Giants, Nets, Bruins, or Mets, so that name would be unfair.

There had been a bit of concern over parking my car in South Philly overnight, but between the wind and the driving rain we figured that nobody was going to try to steal a car, much less the random cardboard boxes inside one. Still, I was relieved to find that it was still there in the morning for the 6-hour drive to Boston.

City Hall in Philadelphia

The first thing you notice about highway driving once you get past DC is that there are a whole lot of toll roads. Fortunately, the facilities themselves are generally well-maintained, even if the view isn't much to write home about.

"Visit scenic New Jersey!"

On the New Jersey Turnpike, things start out well enough, but as you approach New York City the exit tolls get higher and higher and the landscape turns much more barren and industrial. It's a bit like Delaware in that regard. However, you do get a pretty nice view of some of the fantastic bridges that the New York area is known for, and you pass within a few hundred yards of New Meadowlands. I was surprised to see that in addition to the stadium and a hotel, there was a large entertainment complex complete with one of those fancy indoor ski slopes. Seriously, people, this isn't Dubai - you're only 200 miles from Vermont ski country.

Before leaving the state, however, I took advantage of the uniformly low gas prices ($3.39 at all motorway service areas) and made a stop for lunch.

The Burger King at the rest stop was well stocked with the most important of condiments.

Mr. Lombardi would be proud.

After having just paid $6.95 (because that's an easy toll to collect) to exit the Turnpike, the Port Authority kindly asked me to fork over another $8 to cross the George Washington Bridge. I gladly paid it, however, because it's the only way to: 1) drive through the New Jersey Palisades, a really cool rock formation on the Hudson,

2) drive across the GW Bridge, which just looks cool

and 3) drive along the Trans-Manhattan and Cross-Bronx Expressways, which are both fantastic and terrible at the same time. (The explanation why comes after yet another report from the road...)

They're fantastic in that they're only 1.4 and 6.5 miles long, respectively, but they're some of the most heavily traveled miles of interstate in the whole country. And most of the time, they work pretty well. The really admirable thing, though, is the road maintenance. Since the roads are so busy at all hours of the day, it's next to impossible to shut down even a single lane to do pavement work. The result is tremendous strain on the asphalt, and although there are a lot of potholes it's amazing there aren't more considering the 145,000 vehicles that cross it every day. By comparison, although the Springfield Interchange near DC is even busier (430,000 cars per day), Springfield has 24 lanes at it's widest point, whereas the Cross-Bronx only has six.

Plus, if you like statistics alone, the most expensive mile of surface highway ever built was on the Cross-Bronx. It cost $40,000,000 to construct... in 1964. That's worth about $277 million today.

The downside to the project was that Robert Moses conceived of the two freeways without much if any concern for the residents of the areas in which the highway was inserted. Although he picked a very direct route through quite cheap land, the properties that were reclaimed to build the road were home to well-established communities which were subsequently ripped violently apart by a noisy, dirty traffic-drawing six-lane interstate.

In many ways, it was the Cross-Bronx that singlehandedly brought about changes to the way major highway projects are planned in this country. Through his handling of the project from conception to completion people came to see Moses as someone who was more concerned with his vision and his power than on the needs of the area. He did a lot of good things for New York in his time as an urban planner (although he was never elected, merely selected as the head of various highway/toll authorities), from developing riverside parks and helping fund construction projects through the Great Depression, but in hindsight his blind favoritism towards the automobile in an area as densely populated as New York City can be seen as a stubborn and ultimately unsustainable position.

Stay tuned for Part Four: Red Line to Braintree, in which I actually travel around in Boston.