Trafficking in misery
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 208
ROAD RAGE DEP'T.
Delaware Is in the Way
THEY SAY BUILDING new lanes on the road never fixes traffic jams. It's a rule of planning: you widen the road and the new space just fills up with more cars. Induced demand. I believe the rule in principle and on the evidence of nearly the entire paved portion of the populated United States; still, a decade ago now, New Jersey finally got rid of the squeezedown at Exit 8 on the southbound New Jersey Turnpike, which had always meant an annoying or disastrous backup when all the cars had to merge, and on normal days it's been smooth there ever since.
Then you get to Delaware. Delaware has been doing construction around the Delaware Turnpike off and on as long as I've been driving in the Northeast megalopolis, and it never helps. It never even seems to be trying to help. The construction itself chokes up the traffic and then the construction goes away and the traffic is choked up again. Somewhere along the way they added E-ZPass lanes, and I think they even got around to the version of the technology that can read your transponder or capture your license plate at highway speed. I'm not sure, because I'm always riding the brakes through there anyway.
This morning Jason Linkins of the New Republic posted "Delaware should be able to take my money or my time but not both" on Bluesky, and given what week of the year it is, I knew immediately what it was about. There are many things I strongly disagree with Jonathan Chait about, but back around the turn of the century, when Chait was also at the New Republic, he used the Delaware Turnpike as the setup for an extended attack on the entire premise of the State of Delaware, which exists, he wrote "to subsidize its people at the rest of the country’s expense."
He was right, and nothing has changed. The old gag about the Jersey Turnpike is to ask New Jersey residents which exit they're from; nobody on the Delaware Turnpike is looking for any exits in Delaware at all. The cars are coming from New Jersey and points north, trying to get to Maryland and points south, or vice versa. The road that does that job happens to clip the corner of Delaware for a few miles, and Delaware clips the drivers. "Altogether Delaware collects some $120 million—around 6 percent of its budget—from tolls, most of it extracted from non-Delawareans," Chait wrote.
But Delaware is not just predatory. It's sloppy. There isn't any inherent reason for the traffic from New Jersey, which just cleared the toll booths at the foot of the Jersey Turnpike with no problems and may have even gotten over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, to lock up on the way through Delaware. It's the same number of cars running on the same general kind of highway. Delaware is just completely incompetent at traffic engineering; more precisely, it doesn't care about traffic engineering for the people passing through. The highways running down the state to the beaches seem to work mostly fine, aside from the unavoidable summer-weekend backups around the beach towns proper, when everyone is trying to get in or out at once. To sit staring at brake lights at the north end of Delaware, losing an hour of time that you'd wanted to spend in another state, is to understand that the people in charge put no value on your life at all.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, November 25, 2024
★★★★ The dawn sky was unremarkable at first viewing but then pink arrived and found the little western clouds. Windows that had been opened in the sleepless early dark, to try to clear the smell of last night's frying, could stay open; the cold was harmless. Moss on the wall of the Park caught the light in patches of green and patches of rust. A nuthatch worked its way along the broken limb of a tree. The urban and the rustic breeds of sparrow made an overlapping clamor. By the Pool, the remaining leaves had attained overwhelming primary red and yellow. A long multicolored scarf hung from the bracket of a crosswalk signal. Just after sunset—well before 5—it was the clouds in the east that caught the pink departing.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Entertainment Cook Book: Recipes by Students of Central College for Women, Lexington, Missouri, compiled by Lexington Central College Club, Mo. Central College for Women, published in 1919 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
SANDWICHES
1 cup ground nuts,
1 cup grated cheese,
1/2 cup ground midget pickles.
Mix together with mayonnaise. Spread on bread sliced thin. —Rotha A. Hyner, 5192 Kensington Ave., St. Louis, Mo.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
