The Atlantic

After 61 Years, America’s Busiest Highway Is Almost Complete

An infamous gap in Interstate 95 will finally be closed this summer.
Source: Robinson Meyer / The Atlantic

PENNINGTON, N.J.—The past few years have been thick with promises of shiny new infrastructure and the revival of American greatness.

Funny, then, that so little has been made of a quiet victory for U.S. infrastructure due later this year. By September 2018, one of the country’s most famous civil-engineering projects will finally complete construction, six decades after work on it began.

Interstate 95, the country’s most used highway, will finally run as one continuous road between Miami and Maine by the late summer. The interstate’s infamous “gap” on the Pennsylvania and New Jersey border will be closed, turning I-95 into an unbroken river of concrete more than 1,900 miles long. In so doing, it will also mark a larger milestone, say transportation officials—the completion of the original United States interstate system.

Construction to fix the I-95 gap began more than eight years ago in Pennsylvania, but it has now reached its final stage. This week, the New Jersey Department of Transportation began switching out road signs

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