At first, I was just irritated. Traffic happens. It’s a bummer, but what are you going do? Just take a deep breath, turn up the stereo, try to think about something pleasant.
After more than four months, my patience is worn thin. By my rough calculations, I’ve lost nearly 24 hours since the end of May—more than an hour a week for the last 20 weeks—slogging my way through Northampton to get home at the end of the day. In addition to the time I’ve wasted, I think about all the extra fuel I’ve used, all the extra exhaust I’ve pumped into the atmosphere. Many nights, I find myself seething with anger by the time I finally make my way out of the city.
After the state Department of Transportation closed the on-ramp to Interstate 91 North at exit 18 in Northampton around Memorial Day, my evening commute from our office on Conz Street to my home in Whately went from 15 minutes to about 30 minutes. Because our office is located a few blocks south of downtown Northampton, I’d become accustomed to heading a bit further south on Route 5 and jumping on I-91 at exit 18. With that route closed, my only choice was to travel surface roads through the heart of Northampton.
I’ve been a commuter since I learned to drive. As a kid, I commuted from Hartford to New Haven to school every day. After college, I spent many years living and working in greater Boston, where a daily commute of even a few miles is often an arduous ordeal. Over the years, I’ve endured far worse commutes than the one I’ve faced this summer—a fact that gave me some perspective but no great comfort as I gnashed teeth and sputtered expletives each evening. But I didn’t move to the Valley to sit in traffic. My wife and I came here from Boston in 1995 because the region wasn’t overbuilt and densely populated like many other parts of New England.
As it turns out, there are a lot of us who leave the south side of Northampton headed north each evening—hundreds of us, all piling into what were already the congested main thoroughfares of Paradise City. While I can imagine that some mellow types handled the inconvenience without getting mad, I’ve talked to dozens of people—friends, colleagues, sources—who say that, like me, driving in Northampton these days makes them apoplectic.
The good news: according to sources at MassDOT and in Northampton City Hall, chances are good that repairs to the deteriorated bridge that caused the closure of exit 18 in May will be complete in time to open the on-ramp for the coming Columbus Day weekend.
The bad news: MassDOT thought it had the problem licked back in July.
“The original repairs to the I-91 bridge over Route 5 were completed in July,” said MassDOT Deputy Secretary Rebecca Cyr. “Additional deterioration was then discovered on the next portion of the bridge [and] we are working on these new emergency repairs.” The additional repairs, while similar to those completed in July—the replacement of a number of crushed steel beams—Cyr said, “is unique for each case because it is based on actual field and live traffic conditions.” That’s why the second round of repairs is taking longer to complete than the first round of repairs.
Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz says he is optimistic, based on close and continuing contact with regional highway officials, that MassDOT will soon have the bridge repaired and things back to normal. While the mayor acknowledged that the closure of the on-ramp altered the traffic pattern in Northampton this summer, he doesn’t believe MassDOT and the city could have handled the situation much differently.
“Am I happy about it? No, because I realize that it inconvenienced a lot of people,” Narkewicz said. But the decision to close the on-ramp was the right and probably only decision MassDOT could make when inspectors found crushed beams under the high-speed lane on I-91 North, he said. “When an engineer says you have a potential hazard to public safety, you can’t ignore it.”
Sadly, much of the state’s transportation infrastructure is showing signs of deterioration, Narkewicz said, which increases the chances for disruptions to the normal flow of traffic due to the need for emergency repairs. Ironically, the discovery of deterioration of the bridge at exit 18—a good example of what’s happening to decades-old highway infrastructure throughout New England—happened to coincide with a summer in which Northampton ramped up its efforts to repair many city-maintained roads.
“Part of what you’re seeing is a lot of deferred maintenance coming out of years of recession,” Narkewicz said. With more state transportation money flowing into Northampton and the mayor tapping several millions from the city’s capital budget for road work, “we’ve been trying to catch up on the backlog of deferred maintenance,” he said. Unfortunately, Northampton launched a record number of road projects at the same time MassDOT had to deal with a deferred maintenance problem of its own as an emergency.
During my conversation with the mayor, he repeatedly expressed his concerns about a referendum on the November ballot that he says will derail efforts by Gov. Deval Patrick and the state Legislature to provide reliable funding for transportation improvements in Massachusetts. If approved by voters, Question 1 would repeal a 2013 law that ties gas tax increases to inflation, allowing for automatic annual increases in the state’s gas tax, which funds transportation projects. Narkewicz said the anti-tax impulses expressed in Question 1 are part of the increased politicization of transportation not just in Massachusetts, but nationally.
Those two issues—the gas tax and the state’s transportation challenges—have animated the gubernatorial race, with Republican Charlie Baker favoring the repeal of the automatic tax hike and Democrat Martha Coakley insisting that a repeal would endanger public safety by “jeopardizing” more than a $1 billion in transportation improvements over the next decade.
One of the problems of being stuck in traffic for an extra 15 minutes each day: I listened to more radio news this summer than an irate motorist can handle. By the time I’d passed a dozen lines of orange cones and scores of jersey barriers with nary a hard hat in sight, my faith in our transportation officials and the politicians who appoint them was only further eroded.
When I heard Baker and Coakley barking in sound-bites about their differences, I became more irate, knowing that it took Republicans and Democrats to create the Big Dig, that giant symbol of transportation mismanagement. Neither party has shown an ability to keep our roads and bridges in good repair. Instead, leaders in both parties have caved in to powerful special interests and wasted billions. Their continuing failure to maintain roads and control costs is evident on nearly every road and bridge in the state, nowhere more starkly than exit 18.•
