Pennsylvania Route 43

The James J. Manderino Highway is a 61.8 mile four-lane highway of the Pennsylvania Turnpike system that, when finished by 2010, will connect Interstate 68 in eastern West Virginia to Interstate 376 in Pittsburgh. The highway, completed in three sections, is signed as "PA Turnpike 43."

History

The Manderino Highway, known officially by the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission as the "Mon/Fayette Expressway," after the Monongahela River and Fayette County, Pennsylvania (the highway itself is named after Pennsylvania State Senator James Manderino, who sponsored the Turnpike western expansion bill for its construction), was originally built in the late 1980s by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and transferred over to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission to be operated as a toll facility. Unlike the Pennsylvania Turnpike itself and the Northeast Extension connecting Norristown and Scranton, which uses long-distance tickets, the Manderino Highway, like all of the western expansions of the system, uses fixed tolls collected at regular intervals.

Since the opening of the first two sections (the other is a non-tolled section south of Uniontown, Pennsylvania), the Turnpike Commission started construction on two more sections: the southern section, which is now opened except south of the Pennsylvania/West Virginia State Line, and a 15-mile section north of the original highway at Interstate 70.

When completed, the four-lane highway will not only serve as a north-south alternative to paralleling Interstate 79, but also provide a bypass for Interstate 376 around the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, a notorious four-lane bottleneck that snarls traffic and is a major cause of fatal accidents in the Pittsburgh Area. The highway will also allow direct connections, via the planned I-576 (the Pittsburgh Southern Beltway), to the Pittsburgh International Airport on the western extreme of the Pittsburgh metro area.

The highway is built to present-day Interstate Highway standards, similar to that of Delaware Route 1, but is not planned to become part of the Interstate Highway System like the parent Turnpike. It has been proposed though that the new I-576 use the Mon/Faye route to reconnect with I-376 in Allegheny County, so that the northern section of the route could one day be named I-576 after it's junction with the interstate near Clairton, Pennsylvania.

External link

• http://www.pahighways.com/toll/PATurnpike43.html