After a six year hiatus, the second SEPA Road Enthusiast Meet was held today. I'd like to thank all who attended and for making the trip for the second meet in the Greater Philadelphia area, which has taken the record for attendance at a Pennsylvania meet from the 2003 SWPA.
The meet began as usual at 12 PM at the Sly Fox Brewhouse & Eatery, home of the Route 113 India Pale Ale, on what else, PA 113 in Phoenixville. Some of the attendees did partake of the Route 113 IPA, or as PennDOT would call it the SR 0113 India Pale Ale, which just might be the official beverage for road enthusiasts over the age of 21. The food was good as well as the conversations. Many of the attendees brought road-related materials to peruse as well as to keep: Adam Froehlig - various state official maps from Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania; Doug Kerr - I-87 Northway maps; H. B. Elkins - goodie bags full of Kentucky maps and other Kentucky Transportation Cabinet paraphernalia and I brought a planning map for the Keystone State's Interstate System from the early 1960s which I had acquired from eBay in the mid-2000s.
After lunch, we hopped in our cars and followed PA 23 to the first stop which was at the Philadelphia Traffic Management Center in the PennDOT District 6-0 headquarters in King of Prussia. Thanks go to Len Pundt, who worked for PennDOT, who helped arrange the tour. The TMC, which was called the Traffic Control Center when I toured it in 2004, has been upgraded and now includes two video walls with feeds from traffic cameras around the Philadelphia area as well as content from the Internet and TV. In what seems to have become a constant in Pennsylvania meets that involve visiting a traffic management center, we were witness to an accident on the Platt Bridge tying up traffic.
Continuing east on PA 23, we stopped at the Schuylkill Parkway overpass just north of Bridgeport. Len described what was to have happened with that project, which would have been the eastern end of the "Goat Path" Expressway. Len gave us some background on this abandoned project, which is now used as a driver training course for the State Police. He also explained how PennDOT got into the funding predicament which led to it cancelling this and numerous other expressway projects around the Commonwealth in 1977. One of the points he made was that cancelling these projects did initially save money, but now there is no way to build these to solve the traffic issues of the 21st Century because right-of-way acquisition alone would be astronomically high to carve these highways through dense urbanized areas.
We bid Len adieu and took I-276/PA Turnpike eastbound to PA 309 northbound to observe some of the rehabilitation project that has been taking place since 2003. As soon as joining the Fort Washington Expressway, the attendees could see a vastly improved expressway from the one that had been serving commuters since it was built as a new route for US 309. We encountered the last remaining section to be undergoing rehabilitation heading north and exited in the construction zone at Norristown Road to go west to Bethlehem Pike which was the pre-expressway route of US 309. Traveling north to Cedar Hill Road, which crosses over PA 309, allowed us to view the progress on reconstruction of the northern-most segment.
After stopping at the overpass to see the work, we continued northeast to PA 63 then turned northwest to go to the intersection with US 202 to see the progress on the US 202 Parkway project. A new alignment is underway at PA 63 and work is taking place south along the current alignment. We passed some of the work along US 202 as we headed back to the Sly Fox Brewhouse & Eatery where we said our farewells, and headed to our respective destinations.
