For all of you that are looking forward to going nowhere fast, there's this:
Pennsylvania, West Virginia and federal officials gathered here today to break ground on the final West Virginia section of the Mon-Fayette Expressway.I'm still trying to figure out what the point of all this is... I mean other than a giant boondoggle and give away to the heavy construction industry and related unions.
The four-mile stretch will connect Interstate 68 outside Morgantown with the section that currently ends in Fayette County, Pa.
The $150 million Mountain State section is expected to open in October 2010.
Maybe the folks at PennDOT just wanted to reenact the Braddock Campaign* and try to retake Pittsburgh from the French.
I gotta wonder, though: with the clusterfuck that is the State Budget, does PennDOT, the Turnpike Commission or anyone else really have the money to complete this damned thing in the near future, or are they just jerking off?
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* Of course, they should remember that Braddock gets massacred outside of Pittsburgh (not all too far from Hazelwood in the grand scheme of things) and is buried in a shallow grave outside of Uniontown. One can only hope that the MFX suffers a similar, but more gruesome fate.
3 comments:
The WV section is there to make it easy for folks from Morgantown to drive to the PIT airport. And actually, since the whole Southern Beltway was tacked on to the boondoggle in the early 90s, moving folks from dahn sahth to the airport has been the prime motivating factor -- and pretty much everyone has forgotten about the original idea, which was... er... the (de)/(recon)struction of the mid/lower Mon Valley.
There's no way the Pittsburgh/Monroeville section will ever be built. It's the most expensive section (as in, greater in cost than all other sections of the MFX & SOB combined), and it doesn't have the legislative support that the Southern Beltway has. I'll take anyone's bet on that one.
Uuuhh.. you might want to look at a map. I-79 is more direct route from Morgantown to the Airport.
You fail basic geography?
one guy a very long time ago decided build a direct link from morgantown to pittsburgh international, and dagnabbit he built the destination and the highway...
if it weren't for these self serving bureaucracies usurping the public process, then we wouldn't have all of these wonderful things.
direct route 79 may be, but it's not a toll road. and what would pennsylvania be without a toll road, because afterall, that's where we got the state's name from.
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