To the Editor:
Thank you for the article on Route 55 (March 5). I travel the route many times per year and find Route 47/347 a real safety hazard in addition to lost time.
Several points in the article appear to be slanted on the side of doing nothing about the problem:
• When the Great Egg Harbor GSP bridges were under construction, a concrete beam was dropped onto the old bridge section still in use. This caused major backups going south, with those southbound lanes out of service. At that time county and state officials were calling for the extension of Route 55. Same thing can easily happen with a traffic accident. It also will happen in the evacuation for a storm or other south Cape May disaster. GSP is our only real way to escape.
• Yes, Cape May County is primarily a tourist-driven economy. The 300 hours of normal congestion, BUT that normal congestion brings in from Philadelphia and other PA counties the money to operate the county.
• The cost is over a billion dollars. Yes, but so is every other major roadway project. If we want the tourists to come to CMC the trip has to be made easy to encourage revenue.
• Looking at the revenue income for CMC: taxes $165M, GDP 2023 $8.8B, real estate sales $158.5M. Just for a start that total is $9.21B annually.
• $9.21B should support $1B in road construction. Payback if it pushed up the total revenue 10% is about 1.5 years.
I know this is environmentally sensitive, we could not get a needed backup gas line from Vineland to Upper Township several years ago, so Upper lost the tax revenue of the B.L. England power plant. We should not be looking at 300 hours of inconvenience when it threatens the entire county revenue stream. If there was a 4-lane connection to the GSP in upper CMC that would be a big plus.
Dean Norbeck, Estero, Florida, and Court House
