The commuter’s lament – a stretch of highway that is hated, feared, and looked forward to about as much as a roaring case of explosive diarrhea on a coast-to-coast airline flight.  There are plenty of these travel nightmares in the four-state area, the I-270 corridor to Washington D.C. from Frederick, Route 15, I-70 to Baltimore, even the I-95 corridor around the metro Baltimore/Washington areas.  How long will it take to reach the final destination?  30 minutes?  Two hours?  It’s literally a crap shoot.

However; today I want to focus on one of the more notorious stretches of local highway.  One that only gets worse with each passing month as it snakes its way north to south through Maryland.

Interstate 81.

Traversing one of the slimmest parts of the state, it’s only a twelve mile stretch as it runs through Maryland from Pennsylvania in the north to West Virginia in the south, but trust me when I tell you that it is one of the busiest and most treacherous stretches of roadway I’ve ever been on.

Let’s start with the basics.  It’s only a four lane highway (two lanes either way), and right over the Potomac River in West Virginia the same highway is three lanes on each side (six lanes total), so the traffic is funneled down from three lanes to two (going northbound). 

There’s a disparity in state speed limits.  Pennsylvania is posted at 55 MPH, Maryland is posted at 65 MPH, and West Virginia is posted at 70 MPH.  Drivers traveling north to south are excited to put their foot on the gas, while not so keen on tapping the brakes moving south to north.

Third, the on-ramps to merge onto I-81 (from adjoining or intersecting roads) are notoriously short, so it’s a deal with the driving devils to try and get up to speed and shoehorn one’s way into the highway traffic flow before running out of real estate on the on-ramps.  I make a visible exhale of relief when I reach my destination off-ramp, my fingers finally getting a bit of circulation blood back in them from my tight grip on the steering wheel.

Next is the location.  I-81 (a major north to south interstate highway) intersects I-70 (a major east to west interstate highway).  This “hub” creates a prime location for transportation and trucking companies, who use the convenient location to store and quickly transport goods to waiting customers.  Dotted all around the interchange of I-70 and I-81 are large firms with huge distribution warehouses and depots.  Companies like Fed-Ex, Target, Amazon, and many other Fortune 500 companies are all eager to take advantage of the interchange and its convenient access to a large sweep of the Eastern seaboard’s daily commerce routes.  That means lots and lots of tractor-trailer trucks – and I do mean lots of them.  Statistics indicate that truck traffic on I-81 is at an astounding 32%, so one in three vehicles traversing the road is a tractor-trailer or some other large-scale delivery truck. In fact, the Maryland Department of Transportation reported that truck usage on I-81 is already double the highway’s design capacity[1], and there’s no sign of this growth slowing anytime soon.

Commerce being commerce, this also means there are many truck stops to service these hard working long and short haulers.  There are at least four of these massive service centers clustered around the highway, further increasing the truck traffic.  These truckers are in various states of mind as they travel to and fro – they could be at the end of a long driving stretch and looking forward to a break from the highway.  They could be carrying a full load, making the rig a little slower than usual.

Drivers in cars become quickly impatient with the big rigs, darting in and out of highway traffic in an effort to thread the needle and traverse this stretch of road as quickly as possible.

Add in all of these factors and it becomes a recipe for disaster.  Collisions are frequent, traffic back-ups the norm, and injuries and fatalities are common – all on a small, twelve mile stretch of road.

Efforts to improve the situation have been met with the usual bureaucratic and governmental delays, but development of even more and more distribution centers continues, while the important road infrastructure continues to lag behind.

That means things are destined to get worse before they get better.

So if you’re out and about, take some extra care when driving I-81.  Avoid it if you can (like I do), but if you have to take it (especially in Maryland), be extra vigilant.  Turn down that radio and concentrate on the highway  – both ahead and behind.

Drive safe!

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[1] “I-81/Halfway Boulevard Freight Connection” Study, MDOT, 2020, referenced on 4/15/21, https://www.mdot.maryland.gov/OPCP/2020_INFRA_I81Halfway_Boulevard_Freight_Connection_Narrative.pdf