Usually I get much deeper into my day before this happens. I won’t call it a personal best, but it’s close.
Just after 10 a.m. on Thursday, as I stood in what is now a walled-off construction lane of the Mass. Pike just east of the Allston-Brighton tolls, an irate, red-faced driver questioned my intelligence.
“Moron!’’ he screamed.
Actually, I think he may have used the plural form of that word because I was standing in a fluorescent vest and white hard hat with three members of the state Department of Transportation who were trying to explain the latest construction bottleneck that is elevating blood pressure to dangerous levels from Newton to Natick and beyond.
Here’s what happened. This past Tuesday, on what is the unofficial beginning of fall around here — kids back in school, beach chairs stowed, storm windows at the ready — smoke rose from approximately where I stood on the Pike.
It came from the ears of thousands of drivers stuck in monumental traffic caused by lane closures as construction crews continued early work on a $22 million project that eventually will lead to the replacement of the bridge that carries Commonwealth Avenue over the Pike.
The work had been going on for weeks, turning the best commuting month — August — into one of the worst. Drivers in both directions lose a lane on the Boston side of the tolls.
And standing in the road this week, you could see why commuters are apoplectic. After enduring traffic tie-ups for miles, drivers clear the tolls, approach the construction zone, and this is what they see: barrels, a Jersey barrier, and then an empty lane unencumbered by workers or equipment.
Morons! If you’re going to work only at night, move that damn barrier. Give us back our lane. Free us from our vehicular bondage.
That’s exactly what Rhoda Bernard thought the other day as she rushed from her home in Brighton’s Oak Square to a meeting at the Boston Conservatory on The Fenway.
“I don’t see any actual work being done,’’ Bernard told me. “Today, we were in a parking lot for what appeared to be no reason.’’ Her 20-minute commute is now routinely an hour. And when she got to her meeting late, her only consolation was that two other women – also Pike commuters – arrived even later.
When I told her that the empty lanes were impassable now because of deep ditches carved into the asphalt, she suggested the DOT could use a course in communications and she questioned DOT statistics that the construction is adding just 10 minutes to the morning commute.
“That’s absolutely not true,’’ she said, echoing a lament that set social media aflame earlier this week.
But Frank DePaola, the administrator of DOT’s highway division, insists that it is so, citing data collected from drivers’ smartphones. DePaola said if there was an easier, safer way to get this work done, his crews would be doing that.
The bridge’s support system has to be replaced. There’s limited space. There’s a safety issue. And construction miracles like freezing the earth to thread a tunnel beneath Boston, a la The Big Dig, won’t work here.
“The Big Dig built a lot of temporary roads and relocated traffic so they could do those ground freezings,’’ DePaola said. “If we could do this without any traffic impact, we would be doing it. I apologize that we can’t be working day and night.’’ The work isn’t occurring by day because he believes workers would be imperiled by even worse traffic tie-ups caused by rubberneckers.
In other words, Pike commuters, grin and bear it. For two years.
DePaola has been around the block, though perhaps one not this tied up. An engineer for 37 years, he’s led the state highway division for nearly four.
So if you see him on your morning commute, standing in that walled-off lane, and feel the urge to mock his IQ or flash him the international hand signal of scorn, let it fly if it’ll make you feel any better.
“I can take it,’’ he assured me. “It wouldn’t be the first time.’’