Study: 7 Connecticut spots make “Top 100 Truck Bottleneck List”

http://wtnh.com/2017/01/26/study-7-connecticut-spots-make-top-100-truck-bottleneck-list/

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH)– A new study shows what many commuters already know. Several spots in Connecticut are so bad for traffic that they ranked high on a national list. Seven different places in the state made the “Top 100 Truck Bottleneck List”.

Specifically the I-95, I-91 interchange is the 57th most bottleneck-y spot for trucks in the U.S. Now, I do have an issue with that data, but first let’s talk about this survey, because it’s kind of cool how they do it.

Since 2002, the American Transportation Research Institute has been going over GPS data from trucks looking to see where and when their speed drops below the speed limit and for how long. You see a bunch of trucks all crawling along in the same spot every day, you know you have a bottleneck. Trucking companies use the data to determine routes, or sometimes times. If a certain spot is only bad during morning rush hour, then trucking companies might avoid it for a couple hours a day.

Speaking of timing, the I-91, I-95 interchange is part of the New Haven I-95 corridor improvement plan, along with the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge. It’s all been been under construction for years, but that construction mostly ended in November. So we asked when was this data collected?

“So it was data from January first, 2015 to December 31st 2015. So if that construction was completed in 2016, we may see that play out in next year’s analysis,” said Rebecca Brewster, American Transportation Research Institute.

That interchange had already dropped down 9 places on the list. Now that there are two lanes connecting 91 and 95 south, expect it to drop further. The 91-84 interchange in Hartford is the worst in Connecticut at 24th on the list. I-95 in Stamford, Norwalk and Bridgeport are on there, too. So is the mixmaster in Waterbury and the Charter Oak Bridge in Hartford.

This is a tool used by trucking companies to plan routes. The Institute does not consider this an indictment of the state’s infrastructure, just an acknowledgement of how busy our highways are.