Congestion On The Road To Recovery: DOT Numbers Show More Drivers Hitting New York Roads
NEW YORK, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) -- Have you noticed more cars on the road recently?
You're not imagining it. The numbers are up and so are delays.
In these past weeks, the road has opened up for so many, but there are early signs of a gridlock comeback.
CBS2's Dan Rice has spotted some traffic from Chopper 2 over the past few days.
Construction caused quite a bit of traffic on the Gowanas on Wednesday afternoon, but another back-up was strictly from volume.
"Which is a good sign that people hitting the roadways, I guess. A little inching toward normalcy there," Rice said.
Not everyone sees it that way, however.
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Annie Mota, of Westchester County, has had it up to here with traffic.
"It's back. An hour and a half to get home today," she told CBS2's Dick Brennan.
"Before when the corona was, I would say you could get to anywhere within five, ten minutes. Now it's not as easy, a lot of people are going out," said Dusha Kameraj, of the Lower East Side.
So what is going on here?
Volume is still way down from last year, but numbers on East River Bridge crossings from the Department of Transportation clearly show traffic increasing week by week.
"Right now, we are seeing traffic starting to come back," said Jim Battagliese, of Total Traffic and Weather Networks.
He says traffic levels had plunged by 50%, but after just three weeks in the month of May, it's spiked up.
"Compared to pre-COVID numbers, we're back to about 67%," Battagliese said.
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Driving, but not always carefully. Some have used highways as speedways.
"The accidents that we've seen in the last few months have been a lot nastier than what we've seen pre-COVID-19 because people were driving crazy," Battagliese said.
Now with volume coming back, where is it coming from? People who are slowly heading back to work, including Keith Kallmeyer, who works in construction.
"As we open up more, it's gonna go back to normal," he said.
There's likely more congestion on the road to recovery.