Road trip: the calculus of getting from point A to point B

Door to door, it should take only a couple of minutes on the Merritt Parkway to go from Trumbull's unofficial downtown to the Shelton SportsCenter. The trip is a mere seven miles, the bulk of it on the highway.

After all, this is lunchtime, not rush hour. The sun is shining. The pavement is dry. We round a curve from Route 25 onto the Merritt, travel a couple hundred yards and join a conga line of bumper-to-bumper vehicles not going anywhere.

Not because of an accident. The source of our delay is a state Department of Transportation landscaping project. The crews need elbow room to mow, so one of the two northbound lanes is closed, causing motorists in the right lane to nose their vehicles into the left lane -- inch by inch. Rarely does anyone just let them into our lane. Seinfeldian etiquette is at work. If they want in, we make them really work at it.

"Are we there yet?" a passenger groans from the back seat. (No.) "Shouldn't we be there already." (I wish.) Two minutes later: "When are we gonna get there?"

Sitting in traffic and getting nowhere fast is no joy. Yet this is the season where most DOT maintenance and construction projects take place. Lanes are closed, usually from early evening until early morning, before the morning rush hour in many places along the Merritt and Interstate 95, snarling traffic at times when motorists least expect it.

Couldn't they start this work later -- say after 9 p.m., instead of 7 p.m.? At the tail end of rush hour a few days later, four lanes of traffic that merge between Bridgeport and Trumbull at the Route 25 and Merritt southbound interchange came to a dead stop.

The reason: nighttime construction to resurface the road is under way. There are about a dozen heavy-equipment trucks there and only one southbound lane open. And not a single one of the DOT portable illuminated signs is in place on the Merritt to warn motorists ahead of time. Wouldn't that be handy?

If they have scheduled construction projects, we should have advance notice and years of DOT engineering insight behind it. With all these geniuses at work, couldn't somebody think about letting us -- the commuting, cruising public -- know what lies ahead so we might take a detour and avoid a traffic headache?

The DOT has an e-mail service that sends text messages to subscribers' computers and cell phones notifying motorists of accidents and delays, DOT spokesman Kevin Nursick tells me.

"It's an early notification system that lets motorists know what's going on the roadways so they can take that information into consideration to detour around those trouble spots," Nursick said. "Are you signed up for that?" Of course not. (Now I am. You can too by visiting www.ct.gov/dot).

Since its 2005 debut, the service has 10,832 subscribers. In fact, the DOT won kudos from the Federal Highway Administration for its e-alerts. On a trip that should have taken a handful of minutes, we stewed in traffic for almost half an hour. Interestingly, even if I had the smarts to sign up for it, the service in this instance, wouldn't have helped.

"In the beginning, we sent them out whenever there was a significant incident on the roads," Nursick said. "Subscribers appreciated being notified, but they told us -- in no uncertain terms -- that we were drowning them in e-mails." So the DOT changed its policy, only issuing e-alerts where projected delays are an hour or longer.

If it seems like Interstate 95 in Connecticut is starting to resemble the Long Island Expressway, New York's largest moving parking lot, there's good reason. The 89-mile Connecticut Turnpike, which opened in 1959, was designed to handle between 90,000 and 115,000 vehicles per day. At its half-century mark now, it operates well beyond its design capacity, with some portions near downtown Bridgeport, handling at least 159,800 vehicles every day. That's more traffic volume, according to DOT statistics, than any other stretch of Interstate 95 in Connecticut.

"People in a large metropolitan area may accept that a 20-mile freeway trip takes 40 minutes during the peak period," the DOT states in a recent analysis, "[but] not 25 minutes one day and two hours the next."

That's exactly what forensic accountant Chris Gallo often faces commuting between Shelton and Stamford to see clients.

He arranges late-morning appointments. "It's too hard otherwise," says Gallo, who heads Connecticut Commuters Inc. "The e-alerts from the DOT sound good. But the DOT's communication about accidents and delays is inconsistent at best."

MariAn Gail Brown, a Connecticut Post columnist, can be reached at 203-330-6288 or mgbrown@ctpost.com.