A rough Monday looms for Bay Area drivers

As I drive to work tomorrow, I can take heart in the fact that tens of thousands of people are going to have a morning commute worlds worse than mine is going to be.

These are pictures of a section of freeway that funnels traffic onto the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge burning white hot early this morning after a gasoline tanker truck overturned and caught fire.

Talk about lucky - the driver, who suffered second-degree burns, walked away from the accident and hailed a taxi to a local hospital. The LA Times didn't say whether the drive was charged with leaving the scene of an accident, but I'm sure he didn't really care after walking away from that disaster.

From the LA Times:

The California Highway Patrol said the truck crashed on the interchange from westbound Interstate 80 to southbound Interstate 880, which carries traffic from Berkeley and Vallejo south toward San Jose. The CHP said intense flames and heat from the fire caused the overhead connector from eastbound Interstate 80 to eastbound 580, which carries traffic from San Francisco into East Bay, to fall onto the interchange.

Officials encouraged motorists to carpool, find alternative routes around the closure and take public transportation. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District announced that it would be running longer trains Monday and increase its capacity by 50% to help relieve increased traffic congestion.

I'm always whining and complaining about I-76 (known locally as the Schuylkill Expressway, and no, President Bush probably can't pronounce it), the major artery that connects Philadelphia to the suburbs. The special challenge with this highway is that there is no way to expand it but up, and that will almost certainly never happen.

A few years back, I wrote PENNDOT and proposed doing just that - decking I-76 to double the highway's capacity. Finally, I received a tart reply from Roger A. Madigan (R), the chairman of the Pennsylvania Senate Transportation Committee, which said that building a 15-mile bridge from King of Prussia to Philadelphia just wasn't going to happen.

Anyway, maybe it's a good thing PENNDOT doesn't fix I-76 with a deck, because I've always had a phobia about traveling on the bottom part of a decked highway, and through traffic tunnels, because of accidents like these.

I could certainly get over it, though, if my commute time were cut considerably by a congestion-free highway, regardless of the number of decks. I just want highway fixed. I think it's time to begin writing letters again.

Top Photo: AP/Bryan Carmodi
Bottom Photo: AP/The Oakland Tribune, Noah Berger