The Road Ahead is a project by LehighValleyNews.com on traffic and transportation issues in Lehigh and Northampton counties. This is PART ONE of the series.
BUSHKILL TWP., Pa. — When Wayne Simpson moved into the township, he and his growing family would enjoy occasional summer meals on their back patio.
That was in 1991, before Route 33 — a few hundred feet behind his home — connected to Interstate 78.
It was before the Lehigh Valley's population boomed, before the region became a warehouse and distribution hub — and before the rush of traffic drowned out the conversation on the back patio.
Simpson, a Nazareth Area School Board director, keeps a balanced perspective on the changes.
The region has seen enormous growth over the years, bringing more jobs and a robust tax base. But there have been undeniable trade-offs, like those nights on the patio and the sheer amount of traffic local motorists encounter in their commutes to work or simply running errands.
"We live in an area where everybody wants to live," Simpson said. "We’re blessed. Unfortunately, the infrastructure wasn’t put into place."
Local traffic has polled as one of the few persistent complaints Lehigh Valley residents have with the region, said Chris Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion.
One year he asked his survey participants what words came to mind when they thought of Route 22. The phrases "trauma," "battle zone" and "hellscape" came up, he said.
"From an arc of the last 20, 25 years, it's one of those issues that is perennially a point of concern," Borick said.
While the traffic here doesn't compare to the D.C. Beltway or the New Jersey Turnpike, it is getting worse.
An analysis of PennDOT traffic volume data by LehighValleyNews.com shows that congestion has spread into new portions of the Lehigh Valley's most traveled roads over the past decade.
In some places, already crowded highways have become busier. And, the people driving these are sharing the road with more and more tractor-trailers.
The analysis of PennDOT data shows that since 2015:
- The busiest portion of any road in the region is Interstate 78/Route 22 between the highways' merge point and Route 100 in Upper Macungie Township. An average of 126,705 vehicles travel through this spot every day — a 54.5% spike in traffic from 10 years ago. But, other portions of I-78 still haven't approached capacity decades after it was routed south of Route 22 to the New Jersey border.
- While traffic on Route 22 has held steady through much of Lehigh County, it's jumped by more than 30% between Routes 512 and 33 in Northampton County — up to 94,335 vehicles a day between Routes 512 and 191. However, Route 22's busiest stretch lies between MacArthur Road and the Fullerton interchange in Lehigh County, with 96,684 vehicles passing through every day.
- Route 33 surpassed Interstate 78 as the second-busiest highway in the region. Nearly 99,000 vehicles travel between Route 22 and Hecktown Road every day — an increase of more than 45%.
- Traffic continued to grow in the hearts of Upper and Lower Macungie townships in Lehigh County. Legs of Route 100, Route 222 and Route 309 all saw traffic volumes grow by 20% or more.
More people, more trucks
That added congestion has been fueled in part by more people moving into the region. Lehigh and Northampton counties added an estimated 49,613 residents between 2010 and 2023, according to the U.S. Census.
Dating back to the 2000s, the Lehigh Valley has been one of the fastest-growing regions in Pennsylvania.
That trend picked up steam during the pandemic as people fled dense urban centers for more suburban communities. July 2020 to July 2021 saw more people move into the region than any of the 10 prior years, according to the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp.
The pandemic played a similar role on the region’s economy. With people stuck at home during lockdown, online sales and home deliveries skyrocketed.
Back in 2015, e-commerce accounted for less than 7% of retail sales in the United States. The U.S. Department of Commerce reported in February that online shopping made up 17.9% of retail sales in the fourth quarter of 2024.
The consequences of those trends are playing out on Lehigh Valley roads, said Bob Dolan, president of the Lehigh Valley chapter of the PA Motor Truck Association.
To meet the spike in orders, more trucks are bringing goods into the region. But an added wrinkle are the new fleets of delivery vans companies like Amazon rely on to complete shipments.
“Everybody is ordering e-commerce. You want it yesterday, and you’re expecting it to be delivered this morning. That has changed the dynamic,” Dolan said.
Making timely deliveries requires a robust network of warehouses to ship goods across the globe. While some goods are moved by air, ship or rail at times, everything moves by truck at some point in the United States, Dolan said.
The growing demand has contributed to the region’s already booming warehouse industry.
Truckers are limited by federal law to 11 hours behind the wheel, Dolan said. That makes the Lehigh Valley prime real estate thanks to its location.
“From the Lehigh Valley, we can actually reach a humongous portion of the United States’ population. I can make it to Canada, I can get to Detroit, Michigan, I can get to Charlotte, I can get to Roanoke, Virginia, in one day,” Dolan said. “We just live in a very, very attractive area for our e-commerce.”
Corporations have looked to capitalize on it.
Local municipalities approved plans for 48.1 million square feet of industrial and warehouse development between 2015 and 2024, according to the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission. That's the equivalent of 1,100 acres — about the size of Jacobsburg state park.
And all those warehouses have attracted more and more trucks to the region.
PennDOT traffic counts on Route 22 just east of MacArthur Road show that the number of trucks more than doubled from 5,593 a day in 2014 to 13,268 a day in 2024.
However, the percentage of trucks on the highway compared to overall traffic barely budged, increasing from 11.5% of vehicles in 2014 to 12.7% in 2024.
But trucks are increasingly showing up on local arterial and collector roads as cargo flows from the expressways to the local warehouses and vice versa.
For example, about 2,270 big rigs drive on Airport Road between City Line Road and Grove Road in Hanover Township, Lehigh County, every day as of Jan. 21. The spot is about three miles south of an 850,000-square-foot FedEx Ground warehouse that opened in Allen Township in 2018.
Back in 2013, some 901 trucks passed Lehigh Valley International Airport on Airport Road every day, making up about 6% of traffic on this segment of Airport Road. Today, the trucks are about 10.2% of all traffic.
A lack of resources
Regional planners have anticipated crowding roads and highways for ages but have lacked the resources to adequately respond, said Becky Bradley, executive director of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission.
Developers can be on the hook for millions of dollars in road improvements in the areas immediately surrounding their projects — widening lanes, adding traffic lights, bolstering bridges for heavier loads.
However, those improvements rarely address the congestion that results downstream of those properties, Bradley said.
"Essentially, development is coming in and not paying for the infrastructure," Bradley said.
In theory, communities can charge developers traffic impact fees to help offset the stresses being placed on local roads. However, those projects require coordination with other local governments and partners plus expensive, detailed studies that communities often can't afford.
Places like Upper Macungie Township and Lower Nazareth Township do charge developers a one-time fee for road improvements to handle the new traffic the construction is expected to generate, Bradley said.
That funding is typically limited to local roads, though.
For major expressways, the money typically comes from state and federal sources. But Bradley said funding at those levels has failed to keep up with the Lehigh Valley's growth — something most drivers notice and experience every day.
Gas taxes are supposed to be the main revenue source for highway and bridge improvements, but Congress last hiked the federal gas tax in October 1993.
In the resulting 32 years, vehicles have become far more fuel efficient or switched to alternative fuels entirely, Bradley said.
While former Gov. Tom Corbett signed a gas tax increase into law in 2013 — Pennsylvania's rate of 57.6 cents per gallon is second-highest in the nation — the state's Transportation Funding Advisory Commission warned it still left $4.8 billion of transportation needs unfunded as of 2020.
It doesn't help that the funding formulas that direct where state and federal funding go aren't written in the Lehigh Valley's favor, Bradley said.
Those formulas tend to place greater emphasis on road miles than on the number of vehicles traveling those roads, she said. While state officials are aware of the issue and work with local leaders to direct money to Lehigh Valley projects when possible, it's left the region unable to address some of its biggest needs, she said.
In 2023, the Lehigh Valley Transportation Study completed its Long-Range Plan, which anticipates and tries to schedule transportation projects over the next 25 years. While it has $4.9 billion worth of projects slated for construction throughout that period, the study identified another $2.6 billion of priority projects that won't be addressed in that time due to a lack of funding.
Work that failed to make the cut included efforts to convert multiple Route 222 interchanges in Upper Macungie and South Whitehall townships into roundabouts and the reconfiguration of the Interstate 78/Route 222 interchange.
Key work is still getting done. PennDOT is upgrading the Route 309 interchange at Tilghman Street, which has proven to be a crash magnet thanks to its short ramps, and plans are in place to upgrade the Route 22 interchange at Route 191.
When possible, Bradley said, improvements are made with long-term goals in mind. For example, the Route 22 bridge over the Lehigh River was built with room to accommodate extra lanes should funding ever emerge to widen the highway.
But with many major projects too expensive to tackle in the foreseeable future, local planners and municipal leaders are trying to make improvements on the margins.
In recent years, LANTA has reworked its services to focus on more frequent visits along its main routes in a bid to make public transit more attractive and convenient. Buses connecting Easton to Trexlertown and the Wind Creek Bethlehem casino to the Whitehall Township Walmart embark now every 30 minutes instead of every hour.
The goal, Bradley said, is to explore viable alternatives that will get people where they need to go while taking cars off the road.
It's why the transportation study has worked to better connect the region's bike paths and trails and to make them more accessible. U.S. Census data shows that only 2% of Lehigh Valley households walk to work, but even tiny improvements would mean removing hundreds of cars from rush-hour traffic, Bradley said.
"It's seemingly small, but if you add them all up, they make a difference. Where we can find those efficiencies, we should work on them," she said.
COMING TOMORROW - PART 2: Hell on the highway — How stress, distractions and bad behavior put every driver in peril
