Chester County
e-Connection
July 21, 2008
TOP STORY
Part of Pa. Plan for I-80 Tolls, Roadwork Revealed
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission on Monday rolled out a plan to spend about $250 million a year from Interstate 80 toll collections to repair the highway's surface, rebuild its bridges and perform other construction.
The commission's plan is part of a revised application for permission to toll I-80 that is expected to be submitted to federal regulators next month. If approved, the commission expects tolls to be in place in late summer 2010.
The $250 million annual figure is about four times what the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation currently spends on capital improvements to the 311-mile highway that stretches across Pennsylvania between Ohio and New Jersey, turnpike officials said.
An assessment of the interstate showed that more than half its length has not been repaved since it was built some 40 years ago. Also, the assessment revealed that 16 bridges are structurally deficient and 69 are functionally obsolete.
Over the first decade, the commission plans to rebuild or rehabilitate 105 miles of I-80, replace 62 of its bridges - including all four with less than 15 feet of clearance - and complete a $179 million connection to Interstate 99 outside State College.
Project manager Barry J. Schoch said it will cost about $60 million to build a cashless "open road" tolling system in which a driver without E-ZPass will have his or her license plate photographed, generating a mailed-out bill for the vehicle owner. That technology is not currently used on any U.S. highway, he said.
Drivers with E-ZPass, the electronic toll-payment system in use across the Northeast, will see tolls automatically deducted from their accounts. The proposed locations of toll collection sites, a topic of keen interest to the people who live along the highway, are expected to be disclosed next month, Schoch said.
Planners have toyed with various scenarios of where to put as many as 10 tolling locations, and estimate that about a third of local automobile traffic will get on and off the interstate without having to pay a toll. The projections exclude trucks and through traffic.
"This might be a prototype of the way interstates are tolled in the future," Schoch said.
Schoch said planners are considering whether to add truck climbing lanes on portions of the interstate, and to widen the shoulder in places to allow roadwork to be performed without having to narrow traffic to a single lane.
Under a state transportation law passed last summer, the turnpike would lease I-80 from PennDOT for 50 years. The tolls are projected to bring the state about $1 billion a year in the first decade, rising to about $2.6 billion annually in the deal's final years.
The money would be spent on transportation needs around the state, including highway maintenance and repair, bridge replacement and mass transit subsidies.
A rival plan to lease the Pennsylvania Turnpike to a private consortium attracted a high bid of $12.8 billion in upfront cash, but that deal has been slow to attract legislative approval. If the General Assembly were to opt for the turnpike lease, the I-80 tolling plan would be abandoned.
CHESTER COUNTY ROADWORK
Please find an updated list of weekly roadwork from PennDOT
Engineering District 6-0: PennDOT Weekly Traffic Bulletin
Lane Closures This Week on I-476 in Montgomery County
Overnight and daytime lane closures are scheduled next week on Interstate 476 between the Interstate 76 and Ridge Pike interchanges in West Conshohocken Borough and Plymouth Township, Montgomery County, for construction, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) said today.
The contractors' schedules are:
- Sunday and Monday (July 20-21) from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., I-476's northbound and southbound left lanes will be closed for crossover construction.
- Tuesday and Wednesday (July 22-23) from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., I-476's southbound left lane will be closed for shoulder construction.
- Tuesday and Wednesday (July 22-23) from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., I-476's southbound right lane will be closed while a crane is positioned on the bridge to remove debris from a bridge pier.
Motorists are advised to allow additional time to travel through the construction area.
The night work is part of PennDOT's $47,438,576 project to rehabilitate the I-476 Bridge over the Schuylkill River in West Conshohocken Borough and Plymouth Township. Construction on the bridge will start in early 2009 and finish in late 2010.
The daytime operation on the bridge is for PennDOT's $749,590 to upgrade 31 bridges in Philadelphia region.
The work schedules are dependent on the weather.
TRANSIT NEWS
Preview Regional Rail Schedules
New Regional Rail Schedules will go into effect August 3, 2008. SEPTA has posted previews of these upcoming schedule changes in order to aid our customers in future trip planning. Please keep in mind that these schedules are subject to change before the posted effective date. Text schedules will be posted online when the schedules take effect. Paper schedules are available in our terminals, sales locations and through Customer Service (215-580-7800) prior to the effective date.
Plan My Trip - "Partner Program"
SEPTA is pleased to announce the launch of the Plan My Trip "Partner Program" that will allow anyone to integrate the SEPTA Plan My Trip service into their own website, free of charge. You can now pre-select dates and destinations to offer a customized trip planning feature for visitors right on your website. It's a great opportunity to provide travel planning information to your location or event and to promote environmentally friendly transportation.
Using this new feature is easy, simply select the Partner Program tab in the SEPTA Plan My Trip service, follow the steps and select your trip options. At the end of the process, the system will provide you with a code-snippet that can be inserted into any website to display your customized trip planner.
TURNPIKE NEWS
Get Your E-ZPass Today!
Customers using E-ZPass on the Pennsylvania Turnpike enjoy the convenience of paying tolls without cash or tickets. You have a variety of ways to obtain your E-ZPass transponders. You can visit a retail location (Giant Eagle, GetGo from Giant Eagle, Acme and AAA), apply on-line or just pick up the phone and give us a call at 1-877-PENNPASS.
OTHER TRANSPORTATION NEWS
Carnegie Mellon Study Shows Just Listening To Cell Phones Significantly Impairs Drivers
Brain Imaging Reveals Drivers Are Distracted Even if They Don't Talk
Carnegie Mellon University scientists have shown that just listening to a cell phone while driving is a significant distraction, and it causes drivers to commit some of the same types of driving errors that can occur under the influence of alcohol.
The use of cell phones, including dialing and texting, has long been a safety concern for drivers. But the Carnegie Mellon study, for the first time, used brain imaging to document that listening alone reduces by 37 percent the amount of brain activity associated with driving. This can cause drivers to weave out of their lane, based on the performance of subjects using a driving simulator.
The findings, to be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Brain Research, show that making cell phones hands-free or voice-activated is not sufficient in eliminating distractions to drivers. "Drivers need to keep not only their hands on the wheel; they also have to keep their brains on the road," said neuroscientist Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging.
Other distractions, such as eating, listening to the radio or talking with a passenger, also can divert a driver. Though it is not known how these activities compare to cell phone use, Just said there are reasons to believe cell phones may be especially distracting. "Talking on a cell phone has a special social demand, such that not attending to the cell conversation can be interpreted as rude, insulting behavior," he noted. A passenger, by contrast, is likely to recognize increased demands on the driver's attention and stop talking.
The 29 study volunteers used a driving simulator while inside an MRI brain scanner. They steered a car along a virtual winding road at a fixed, challenging speed, either while they were undisturbed, or while they were deciding whether a sentence they heard was true or false. Just's team used state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods to measure activity in 20,000 brain locations, each about the size of a peppercorn. Measurements were made every second.
The driving-while-listening condition produced a 37 percent decrease in activity of the brain's parietal lobe, which is associated with driving. This portion of the brain integrates sensory information and is critical for spatial sense and navigation. Activity was also reduced in the occipital lobe, which processes visual information.
The other impact of driving-while-listening was a significant deterioration in the quality of driving. Subjects who were listening committed more lane maintenance errors, such as hitting a simulated guardrail, and deviating from the middle of the lane. Both kinds of influences decrease the brain's capacity to drive well, and that decrease can be costly when the margin for error is small.
"The clear implication is that engaging in a demanding conversation could jeopardize judgment and reaction time if an atypical or unusual driving situation arose," Just said. "Heavy traffic is no place for an involved personal or business discussion, let alone texting."
Because driving and listening draw on two different brain networks, scientists had previously suspected that the networks could work independently on each task. But Just said this study demonstrates that there is only so much that the brain can do at one time, no matter how different the two tasks are.
The study emerges from the new field of neuroergonomics, which combines brain science with human-computer interaction studies that measure how well a technology matches human capabilities. Neuroergonomics is beginning to be applied to the operation of vehicles like aircraft, ships and cars in which drivers now have navigation systems, iPods and even DVD players at their disposal. Every additional input to a driver consumes some of his or her brain capacity, taking away some of the resources that monitor for other vehicles, lane markers, obstacles, and sudden changes in conditions.
"Drivers' seats in many vehicles are becoming highly instrumented cockpits," Just said, "and during difficult driving situations, they require the undivided attention of the driver's brain."
The project was funded by the Office of Naval Research. Other members of the research team included post-doctoral research associate Timothy Keller and research assistant Jacquelyn Cynkar. For information on the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, or to download a copy of this research paper, visit http://www.ccbi.cmu.edu
Membership Development Professional
The Transportation Management Association of Chester County (TMACC) is seeking a development professional who will be responsible for marketing and selling corporate memberships in the association.
Qualified candidates must have at least two to three years experience in a similar position for a non profit organization and should have the energy and drive to develop new prospects. Compensation depends upon experience and ability.
While the position is full time we would be willing to adjust hours for the right candidate.
Send resumes by e-mail, fax or mail to Margaret Murrin: margaret@tmacc.org
610-993-0922 (fax)
No phone calls please.
Information sources include PennDOT’s Engineering District 6-0, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, SEPTA and the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
