There are several things that unite us as Lehigh Valleyites — Musikfest, which begins this week, the IronPigs, the Phantoms, the Bach Choir — but nothing makes us feel so united, I would wager, as our hatred for Route 22. Route 22 sucks. In fact, Route 22 sucks so bad, the name of the road should be changed officially to Route 22 Sucks. Let's say you're providing directions: "Okay, Bill, get off the Northeast Extension, take Route 22 Sucks Eastbound, and get off on Airport Road South." Of course, Airport Road South sucks, too, just not as bad as Route 22.
Now, to be fair, the pre-22 days were a nightmare. I checked this. Traveling west from New Jersey into Allentown, you had to go through downtown Easton on Northampton Street, then through Wilson, then William Penn Highway through Palmer and Bethlehem Townships, then through Bethlehem along Union Boulevard. Along the way, you went through 31 traffic lights and a series of twisting, winding roads. So, 22 looked pretty good.
But things got bad early. Way back in 1963, just nine years after the road opened, state police had already informed local officials the throughway could not handle traffic at rush hour. By 1977, PennDOT figures showed that 22 was already the fourth heaviest travel highway in Pennsylvania, with 51,000 vehicles daily. Now there's four times as many, many of them trucks.
So, there's a reason the road is jammed, but what puzzles me are the inexplicable delays. It's jammed at, say 11:30 AM from Airport Road to Fullerton Avenue, then suddenly, it's not jammed. There's no construction, no bridge repair, no rubbernecking, so what the heck happened? Nobody knows. The most inexplicable Route 22 stoppage for me is midday eastbound. To get to my home in Hanover Township, I almost always get off at Schoenersville Road, and right at that point, the traffic often stops. It's not rush hour, it could be 3:00 in the afternoon. What happened? Is there a pothole on Cemetery Curve? A bank robbery in Phillipsburg that suddenly closed all the roads?
For my job and personal reasons, I've driven to New York hundreds of times over the last 40 years, and traveling to New York City is far more predictable than traveling around the Lehigh Valley because of Route 22.
Of course, we were supposed to get relief from our Route 22 nightmares with the opening of Route 78. 78 was our savior, our Messiah. A 32-mile-long section of salvation. But guess what? Route 78 kinda sucks. In many ways, it's worse than 22 because, though it's usually open, if you get stuck on 78, it's a full fledged disaster rather than the bad case of agita produced by delays on 22.
Now, there were many other Lehigh Valley roads nominated as horror shows: Cedar Crest Boulevard, Willow Brook Road in Catty, somebody mentioned 6th Street from Sumner Avenue to Macarthur Road and said it's like driving through a back alley. But I still hold to my belief that 22 — I mean 22 Sucks — is the worst.
Still, we get on Route 22 for the simple reason that we have to, and complaining about it is baked into the DNA of a true Lehigh Valleyite. One more thing: why is it called the Throughway? It's anything but a way through. It should be called a stallway.
Anyway, Something to Say will have nothing to say for a few weeks while I'm on vacation. I'll be traveling and spending some time at the shore, far away from Route 22. Although, let me tell you something, the Garden State Parkway on the weekend is no picnic.
