U.S. Route 301 Turnpike (Delaware)

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The U.S. Route 301 Turnpike in Delaware is a proposed 12-mile, four-lane toll highway connecting the existing four-lane U.S. 301 highway near Warwick, Maryland to the Delaware Route 1 Turnpike near St. Georges, Delaware. The road will serve as a high-speed bypass around the cities of Middletown and Newark, Delaware.

1 History
2 Description
3 See also
4 External Links

[edit] History

Plans for a four-lane superhighway connecting the New Jersey Turnpike (via the Delaware Memorial Bridge) with the Washington, D.C. metro area dates back to the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in the mid-1950's. As to provide adequate coverage for the entire Chesapeake Bay region, two separate toll highways, to be jointly operated by both Maryland and Delaware, were proposed. One road would parallel the existing U.S. 301 (then a two-lane road), but this was never built, although U.S. 301 was eventually upgraded to a high-speed four-lane road with both at-grade and grade-separated exits. Another road, to be part of the mainline I-95 route between Maine and Florida, was eventually built, as the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway and the Delaware Turnpike, and followed the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and Washington, D.C., with a spur (I-97) providing access to Annapolis, Maryland. Despite the upgrade of most of U.S. 50 and 301 to freeway standards between Washington, D.C. and Queen Anne's County (which included the building of a parallel span to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge) and upgrading U.S. 301 to four lanes, limited budgets in Delaware, along with local opposition from farmers, prevented the state upgrading U.S. 301 to a four-lane road, although in 1960, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, during a major widening and upgrade of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to its present configuration, built the new four-lane Summit Bridge to freeway standards, with its approaches using a 3% climbing grade instead of the 5% grade used on the nearby Chesapeake City and St. Georges Bridges.

Despite the building of the Summit Bridge, U.S. 301 remained, for most of the last 40 years, as either a two-lane road, or as part of U.S. 13 or U.S. 40 (U.S. 301, which currently ends in Glasgow, originally began at the Delaware Turnpike's Farnhurst interchange in New Castle). In the 1980's, in an effort to provide a bypass around Newark, Delaware, DelDOT proposed building a four-lane highway, signed as U.S. 301, that would bypass Glasgow, connect with the Delaware Turnpike (I-95) south of Newark, and then branch off between the current Delaware Route 896 interchange and the service plaza, via the unbuilt Exit-2 interchange. Because of local opposition, DelDOT, in the 1990's, upgraded the mostly two-lane U.S. 301 highway between Boyds Corner and Glasgow to a four-lane divided highway with surface intersections, with a bypass around Glasgow to connect U.S. 301 with U.S. 40, itself also being a surface intersection.

With the surrounding area around Middletown undergoing exponential growth in the 1990's and early 2000's, along with traffic tieups on U.S. 301 and neighboring state highways being common, DelDOT investigated in the resurrecting of the U.S. 301 highway project, but instead of using the original plans in the 1960's, DelDOT instead looked into connecting U.S. 301 with the new Del. Rt. 1 Turnpike in St. Georges. In addition, because of the cuts in federal funds to build and maintain highways, along with U.S. 301 being used as a major heavy truck route, DelDOT also looked into building a toll plaza on the Delaware/Maryland State Line (similar to the Newark Toll Plaza on the Delaware Turnpike) in order to collect the needed tolls to fund the costs of the new road.

[edit] Description

On November 13, 2006, DelDOT annouced that it has chosen the "green route + spur" option to build the new U.S. 301 Turnpike. The main highway itself will consist of a four-lane, limited access toll road built to the same Interstate Highway specification as that of the Delaware Rt. 1 Turnpike (either a concrete surface with asphalt shoulders or, as a time-saving measure, an all-asphalt surface like that used on the Puncheon Run Corridor in Dover) and will have exits for two local roads, as well as Delaware Route 299, the current two-lane U.S. 301 (which is also signed as Delaware Route 71), and Delaware Route 896. A two-lane limited access spur, will connect the main highway with the Summit Bridge at the intersection with Delaware Rts. 71/896 and Delaware Route 15, which connects the Summit Bridge with Chesapeake City, Maryland (via Delaware Route 286).

The northern terminus of the highway will be at the Del. Rt. 1 Turnpike between the Senator William V. Roth, Jr. Bridge and the Biddle's Corner toll plaza, most likely using the existing one-way exit that was constructed in 2000 to provide access to U.S. 13 in South St. Georges, but with provisions to provide complete access to U.S. 301 from Del. Rt. 1 without having to use Del. Rt. 896 as a connector. The "green + spur" option is the lowest cost, and will have minimum impact on property acquisition (35 residential and business properties total, mostly farmland) and would not allow for the demolishing of two local churches.^[1] Thus the location of the exit between the bridge and the toll plaza will allow the U.S. 301 Turnpike to serve as a sort-of "Chesapeake Bay Extension" of the Del. Rt. 1 Turnpike (similar in nature to the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Newark Bay Extension of the New Jersey Turnpike) as well as bringing the original bi-state toll road project back to full circle – the building of two separate toll roads connecting the Washington D.C. metro area with the New Jersey Turnpike, except that the Maryland portions are currently not tolled except at its Susquehanna River/Chesapeake Bay crossings.