I’ve spent approximately 55 years driving on West Shore Bypass Route 422 and each year it gets closer to being renamed the West Shore Parking Lot.
The highway is a mess. It attracts traffic jams like navels attract lint, like lightbulbs attract moths, like my backyard attracts fly balls from the kids playing whiffle ball next door.
The expressway, and I use that term sarcastically, must have been designed by sardine packers, not engineers.
Left exits and competing traffic movements between the Buttonwood Street Bridge underpass in West Reading and the Interstate 176 interchange in Cumru Township often leave cars more jammed than sardines in a jar.
With the all-too frequent traffic jams, West Shore motorists calculate their commute time with a sundial. At times the going is so slow that vehicles are passed by turtles. It’s almost as if the road surface is quicksand, not asphalt.
The slightest accident or if a squirrel decides to take a leisurely stroll across the lanes can tie up traffic for hours. It’s hardly a reliable roadway to getting to an appointment in time.
Indeed, the West Shore Bypass is where patience goes to die. Stranded motorists enduring West Shore traffic gridlock who don’t resort to road rage should be canonized for their restraint.
Sometimes it’s quicker to fly from Philly to Miami than it is to drive from Wyomissing to Exeter. Where are the flying cars the Jetsons invented when you need them?
I needed a flying car the other day when I was inching along the West Shore trying to get to my dermatologist appointment in time. With every passing minute that seemed like an eternity while I seethed behind the wheel, all my moles were inching closer to skin cancer. Or so I dreaded.
No wonder people who live in northern or southern Berks would rather take a wagon train to California than venture anywhere near the West Shore Bypass in a car.
For those brave souls who do attempt the 422 journey, it’s best to pack food, water, a portable toilet or adult diapers and a blanket because you have no idea how long you’ll be stuck in traffic. It’s also not a bad idea to bring along a Bible just in case you’re stranded for hours and suicidal thoughts creep in.
I heard of one guy whose son had just made his First Communion when he drove onto the bypass. By the time he drove off his son had been ordained a priest.
Come to think of it, perhaps the devil designed the West Shore Bypass.
After all, those problematic five miles on the West Shore could be termed the Highway to Hell. But a more appropriate moniker would be the Slow Crawl to Hell.
The good news is there are plans to fix this colossal mess. The bad news is that your children, perhaps even your grandchildren, may not live to see it.
The lengthy timeline is not PennDOT’s fault. Short of divine intervention, there’s no fast way to reconstruct and widen those godforsaken five miles while reconfiguring the problematic Lancaster Avenue and Penn Street/Penn Avenue interchanges — without long-term road closures.
That’s the damning aspect of this dumpster fire. If you shut down the West Shore Bypass, traffic in Reading would be so clogged that nobody would get anywhere. It would take an eternity or two to get from the west side to the east side of Reading.
And the folks who live in Reading would be stuck there until the project was completed. Food and supplies would have to be airlifted into town until the blockade was over.
To keep traffic flowing — make that trickling — on the West Shore Bypass during construction, PennDOT plans to do it methodically over the years.
Phase 1 is expected to take six years. With all the permit and right-of-way-acquisition work, a construction contract isn’t expected to be awarded until the fall of 2027. Yikes!
It took Michelangelo only four years to paint the Sistine Chapel. Again only four years for him to carve the famous sculpture of David out of an 18-foot-tall marble block. I’ve seen the statue David in person and two things — it’s a work of art and it took me less time to get to Florence, Italy than it does sometimes to go from Wyomissing to Mount Penn.
To put those six years of Phase 1 into perspective, it took the Lewis and Clark Expedition only 28 months to travel more than 8,000 miles by boat, horseback and foot.
Granted, they didn’t hit one traffic jam.
While the completion of Phase 1 is a distant dot on the horizon, once it arrives absolutely giddy Berks motorists will enjoy eight lanes between the Penn and Lancaster Avenue interchanges, a huge upgrade from the current configuration of two travel lanes in each direction with short, single-lane ramps.
Phase 2 will involve widening the section between the Buttonwood Street Bridge underpass and Route 12 on the western end of the reconstruction and replacing a bridge that carries Route 422 over the Schuylkill River on the eastern end.
You may want to move to Greenland after you read the ensuing sentence. The forecast contract-letting date for Phase 2 likely won’t be until 2034.
Phase 2 will require about four years of construction, which means Berks motorists are looking at a decade of West Shore Bypass construction activity beginning late this decade.
A decade is a long time to hang by your thumbs in traffic. But it’s just a blink in time compared to the 30 years it took the Egyptians to build some of the pyramids. And that’s not counting commute time.
In the immortal words of Daffy Duck, all good things are worth waiting to quack about.
Someday the renovated, redesigned, retooled and resuscitated West Shore Bypass will be a dragstrip of propulsive journeys traveling like a lit fuse. Cops will be handing out speeding tickets like they were Tic Tacs and people will pay the fines joyfully.
Because baby we were born to floor it!
Mike Zielinski, a resident of Berks County, is a columnist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
Source: Berkshire mont
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