This area of roadway north of Bushkill Access will be one of the areas of US Route 209 that will be under improvement during 2022 NPS/M.Cuff
Work to rehabilitate a stretch of U.S. 209 that runs through Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in Pennsylvania will begin in the spring.
According to the National Park Service, $6.5 million from the Great American Outdoors Act will be used to rehab a seven-mile stretch of the highway. It will be the first phase of a $21.5 million project to improve the park’s primary north-south route on the Pennsylvania side.
“This road project will modernize a vital piece of the park’s infrastructure and enhance safety and access for the millions of people who visit Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area each year and for local residents and commuters who use this road each day,” said park Superintendent Sula Jacobs. “It will address one of the largest and most expensive infrastructure needs in the park. Route 209 is top-priority road that serves as an emergency route for local communities and provides access to those communities and to popular recreational facilities located along the corridor. However, it is currently in very poor condition with failing pavement, poor drainage, and numerous potholes.”
In the first phase of the Route 209 project, the entire stretch of road between mile marker 0 in Middle Smithfield Township, Monroe County, and mile marker 7 in Lehman Township, Pike County, will be rehabilitated.
Work will include milling the existing pavement, conducting full depth patch repair and spot base repair, culvert replacement, reconstruction of shoulders and line striping. The repair of the road surface, subsurface and drainage systems will extend the life of the road, eliminate the ongoing cost of frequent patching of potholes and other temporary corrective measures, and improve safety for motorists and bicyclists, including correcting the steep drop-offs on the road’s shoulders.
The project is being financed through GAOA’s National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Restoration Fund which, along with the recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other construction funding sources, is part of a concerted effort to address the large maintenance backlog in national parks. When completed, this project is expected to eliminate $16.8 million of the Water Gap's maintenance backlog.
Support Essential Coverage of Essential Places
Comments
Like the BW & GW Parkways, this should be state funded not come out of NPS resources.
So $6.5M is coming out of the GAOA to fund the 1st phase of a $21.5M project that will eliminate $16.8M of the park's maintenance backlog. So the park is planning to spend more on maintenance than its current backlog?
What? It's a shared use between the state as a general purpose highway and NPS for visitor use. It's not much different than the state highways around my area that are also local roads, where the costs are shared between the state and local governments. Or where the roads in our regional parks are commonly used by commuters and park visitors where the costs of road maintenance are shared between the park district and local governments.
Ypw. this road is overwhelmingly used by people commuting or passing through. Traffic that is actually accessing park facilities is a tiny fraction of the total.
Shoulders get damaged because people park on the side and get on/off. But they've got the money for repairs, they're using it on the repairs, and no amount of your complaining about who should pay for it will change that.
YPW ' I'm surprised. I would have thought that you too would rather those monies go to facilities improvements, rangers and land acquisition rather than pay for PA commuters.
Only you would compalin about where the funding is coming from. But in this case it seems to be a lot about protecting the resources. This includes repairing buildings and culverts as well as for the roads that are used by commuters and visitors. There's apparently a huge backlog where putting this off until some other funding source is available is just going to degrade the resource. But I guess playing games with the funding is OK with you because that seems to be more your concern than protecting the park. I've seen what happened when a culvert failed and a road simply collapsed in addition to flooding damaging the immediate area.
There was already work done previously from a different federal funding source.
"Project At-a-Glance: Work will include milling the existing pavement, conducting full depth patch repair and spot base repair, culvert replacement, reconstruction of shoulders and line striping on the most heavily used road in the park."
Sorry YPW - no building repair. This is standard road repair that should be paid for out of state highway funds. Save the Park's money for real Park infrastructure repair and services.
Merry Christmas.