Rash of rush-hour delays

When traffic came to a screeching halt on Interstate 78 twice this week, Jennifer Wilk took to Facebook andTwitter.

The Nazareth working mom who commutes to New Jersey wasn’t complaining about the cumbersome commute or clogged routes. She was trolling for tips from friends and followers before venturing out.

“Thank God for Twitter,” she said midday Friday.

A spate of accidents this week sent frustrated commuters scouring for back roads to save them from routes that better resembled parking lots than highways.

Rush-hour crashes on Interstate 78 twice shut down lanes on the crucial route and claimed one life during the grim morning commute. Both westbound lanes near the Route 412 exit were closed for 10 hours Tuesday after a car headed east on westbound I-78 collided with a tractor-trailer, killing the car’s passenger and spilling fuel across the highway.

Then on Friday, another oil spill snarled I-78 traffic about 5:30 a.m. in Upper Macungie Township. A tanker truck overturned as the driver entered the highway and slid across the eastbound lanes into the center median.

In Friday’s I-78 mishap, oil splashed across all three eastbound lanes, and passing cars tracked fuel for at least another half mile. The detours created chaotic traffic backlogs on Route 100, Schantz Road, Tilghman Street, Hamilton Boulevard and other secondary arteries near the closed interchanges.

And at 2:40 p.m., northbound motorists on the Northeast Extension of the Turnpike suddenly found themselves stranded behind a chain-reaction pileup between Plymouth Meeting and Lansdale. A dozen vehicles, including a state police cruiser, were involved. No one was hurt seriously, but the Extension was shut down two hours and the backlog lasted hours longer.

The Turnpike accident only intensified the commuters’ week from hell that had already seen several crashes, including one that killed a 23-year-old motorcyclist Wednesday after he lost control of his bike while rounding a curve on Route 22.

Wilk said the regular traffic jams are maddening. She drops off her kids for camp each morning at the nearby Nazareth YMCA and then embarks on a later-than-usual trip to her New Jersey office.

“There’s never any minutes to spare there,” she said.

Scared off by traffic horror stories this week, she went shopping for a more gratifying route and wound up in a labyrinth of back roads through Nazareth and Tatamy, then Forks Township and Easton before catching up with I-78.

“Honestly I don’t know that it saved me any time, but I was moving and I felt better about it,” she joked.

I-78 travelers haven’t enjoyed an easy commute for several weeks with ongoing construction near Route 33, but the crashes took things from bad to worse. The week’s congestion surpassed even the most treacherous winter commutes, Wilk said.

If there’s any consolation, Wilk said, it’s that summer vacations took a few drivers off the road. A workday when school is in session would have been double the already-throbbing headache.

And for less savvy, prepared or fortunate drivers, it was.

Traffic on I-78 threw a wrench into Macungie resident Mary Dunlap’s morning, turning a 25-minute commute to Easton into two hours. She was busily trying to get out the door and didn’t seek out traffic reports.

“Tuesday was the longest I’ve ever been in traffic. I turned my car off for probably a good 45 minutes,” Dunlap said. “You see everybody turning around and cutting over to the median, and you question if you should do that as well. But if you don’t know an alternate route, you’re screwed.”

But she learned her lesson and left a bit earlier the rest of the week.

Easton resident Frank Pintabone described one commuter nightmare after another.

On Tuesday, I-78 westbound backed up just before Route 33. Pintabone detoured to Route 22, got off at Hecktown Road, then took back roads to his job.

On Friday, he again ran into congestion on I-78, detoured to Route 22 and Tilghman Street only to find more traffic heaps. Two of his co-workers turned around and went home but Pintabone persevered. Still he was more than an hour late for work both days.

But if coping with traffic at all resembles the seven stages of grief, Pintabone, who passes the time in his car perusing Facebook on his cellphone, has reached the final stage: acceptance.

“There’s really nothing you can do,” he said. “When your paycheck depends on it, you get that motivation. Believe me, it took a long time to realize I could be as frustrated as I want, but it’s not going to make the road pick up any faster. So now I’m going to be stuck and pissed off. It took me years to get there.”

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