Bad Bottlenecks

This appeared on march 26, 2006


The U.S. Department of Transportation last September issued a wide-ranging report on traffic congestion in our fair nation, and included a list of the top 24 "Worst Physical Bottlenecks in the United States."
Surprisingly, Route 100 through Eagle didn't make the cut.
It is, of course, important to study traffic bottlenecks because, as every high school sophomore can tell you, bottlenecks make up the last of the fabled Seven Sources of Traffic Congestion - the others being traffic accidents, work zones, bad weather, Sleepy, Dopey and "That Guy Who Thinks It's Perfectly OK To Go 25 In A 35 mph zone."
The top bottleneck, according to the study, is the Ventura Freeway in California, where U.S. 101 meets Interstate 401 in Los Angeles. Every year, motorists spend an extra 27,144 hours stuck in traffic out there, quietly humming the words to "Ventura Freeway" by America to themselves (sample lyric: "Where the days are longer, the nights are stronger than moonshine ...") until they eventually go insane.
Some bottlenecks have even developed nicknames, says the USDOT, such as the "Spaghetti Junction" on I-285 in Las Vegas, the "Stack" and "Mini-Stack" in Phoenix, and, my favorite, the "Malfunction Junction" on I-275 in Tampa Bay, Fla.
I am sure that the USDOT researchers were simply blinded by the glamour of the locations they found themselves in while doing their study, and otherwise would have included Route 100 on the list, had they been able to pry themselves away from the blackjack tables at Aladdin's for a moment or two.
Eagle has gone from a sleepy little town with a general store and a quaint tavern to one big fat traffic jam tumor on the spine of Chester County. It deserves a place on the top bottleneck list if only to make the poor fools who have to suffer through the daily grind there feel it's all worth the attention.
Meanwhile, they are left to sit in their cars and ponder the following questions:
* "Why do the car dealerships along this road all look slightly like churches, and the churches look vaguely like car dealerships?"
* "It's nice that the township imposed some architectural standards on the new construction in Eagle, but why do all the buildings here remind me of the Bates Motel from "Psycho?"
* "Did the traffic all come to Route 100 because of some strange magnetic attraction created by the triangulated confluence of a used car lot, a Harley dealership and a school bus company, or what?"
Actually, if you want to assign blame for the growth of traffic congestion down Route 100, I propose that you need go no further than the pride of Owen J. Roberts High School, the one and only Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates, the blue-eyed-soul singers of "I Can't Go For That" fame. Imagine it.
D. Hall decides to name the group's second album "Abandoned Luncheonette" after a popular eatery in Eagle, where he probably spent hours honing his craft. The song "She's Gone" shoots Hall & Oates to stardom. In 1975, the men who would later develop Eagle into an East Coast destination come across the album in their daughter's LP collections. They think, "Hmmm, this place looks cool."
Fast forward 20 years and what have you got? The "Eagle's Nest" bottleneck.