RUTHERFORD, N.J. — It is 4:01 p.m. at Shadow Traffic Network, and Fred Bennett's headset is buzzing with bad news.
A school bus accident has snarled traffic along Flatbush Avenue. A disabled tractor-trailer is tying up the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. Another truck accident is blocking an entrance to the George Washington Bridge. Five minutes later, the Manhattan Bridge is packed after being closed while President Bush's motorcade carried him to a GOP fund-raiser at the Waldorf Hotel.
Bennett, operations manager for a firm that provides live reports to 62 area radio and television stations, alternately works the phones and takes two-way radio reports from six aircraft and 40 cars, furiously typing each tie-up onto a color-coded computer screen.
At 4:37, helicopter pilot Bob Glantzberg reports that construction is causing bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway. At 4:57, things look bad on the New Jersey Turnpike. At 4:59, Glantzberg's voice crackles over the headset with word of yet another accident, this one causing a standstill on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Bennett's computer screen is full.
Shadow Traffic's far-flung network provides minute-by-minute confirmation of what anyone who drives in and around New York City already knows: The place is a commuter's nightmare. With 900,000 smoke-spewing vehicles crawling into Manhattan each weekday morning--25% more than a decade ago--traffic routinely backs up at the 20 bridges and tunnels connecting the island with the rest of the sprawling tri-state area.
By one estimate, New Yorkers waste 50 million hours a year stuck in traffic. Eleven million cars compete for space across the 31-county region, a number that is expected to jump to 16 million within 25 years.
Things have gone from awful to absurd recently as a spate of construction projects has further constricted the aging concrete arteries that bind the region. Two lanes on Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, Manhattan's main north-south highway, were closed in July for a reconstruction project scheduled to last three years. Two lanes were shut down in June on the Queensboro Bridge, where endless construction has tied up traffic since the early 1980s.
Repaving on the Long Island Expressway approach to Manhattan will last until 1995; work will continue on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway through 1994. From cable repairs on the Brooklyn Bridge to nighttime work on the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the list seems endless.
