HIGHWAYS: Bridge In

In a hot morning mist last week, a delegation from New Jersey, headed by Governor Alfred Driscoll, drove slowly across the two-mile length of the new Delaware Memorial Bridge. Delaware’s Governor Elbert Carvel was waiting at Pigeon Point, just below Wilmington on the Delaware side. After appropriate speeches and snipping of ribbons, the long lines of waiting trucks and cars started across the $44 million span. Within 24 hours, 20,000 paid toll to bypass the tedious old New Castle-Pennsville ferry; they saved an average two hours on the Jersey route between New York and points south.

To highway planners, the Delaware Memorial Bridge stood for something more exciting than statistics: it is one more completed, solid link in a plan to unsnarl the major postwar highway problems of the northeastern U.S. By November, if all goes well, the new $250 million New Jersey Turnpike will siphon the outpouring of trucks and cars from New York, run them across the Jersey meadows and farmlands at 60 to 70 m.p.h., and spill them out on the new Delaware bridge in half the time of today’s routes. From there, in mid 1952, southbound motorists should be able to bypass Baltimore by cutting through the Eastern Shore of Maryland, crossing the Chesapeake near Annapolis, on a four-mile bridge already begun. This will slice running time between New York and Washington to 4½ hours instead of the present seven.

By 1953, cars and trucks heading west may leave the Jersey Turnpike, cross the Delaware north of Philadelphia to reach the eleven-year-old Pennsylvania Turnpike. Once across Pennsylvania, they may be able to cut westward to Chicago without intersection or stop sign along new expressways planned for northern Ohio and Indiana. At its northern end, the Jersey Turnpike will link with the highspeed New York State Thruway, already under construction between Manhattan, Buffalo and the Pennsylvania border. With another twist of a cloverleaf, it can join New York’s present parkway system into New England, zip up Connecticut’s Wilbur Cross Parkway. Massachusetts is now a bad spot, but it is planning an expressway which will link lower New England with the Maine and New Hampshire expressways.

Construction of U.S. highways is miles behind the outpouring of trucks and cars from Detroit, but in the heaviest-traveled, worst-tangled section of the nation, one bridge at least, has been crossed, and a lot of relief for traffic congestion is in sight.