Give Yourself the Extra Ten Minutes: Road Crews Move In This Week

If your Monday morning runs down East Atlantic Avenue, do future-you a favor and leave a little early this week.

Starting Monday, August 3, and running through Friday, August 7, Camden County road crews will be working East Atlantic Avenue between West Merchant Street in Audubon and Station Avenue in Haddon Heights, with a partial eastbound closure in place each day from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. It’s one of several roadwork projects the county has scheduled across the week, and it happens to sit right on top of a stretch that a whole lot of us use without thinking about it — the everyday artery between two of the friendliest little downtowns in the county.

The road you don’t notice until they fix it

I drove it Friday afternoon before the cones went up, and here’s the thing about a road like East Atlantic. You don’t notice it until somebody starts fixing it. It’s the road you take to drop a kid at practice, to grab a coffee, to cut over to the PATCO lot without dealing with the White Horse Pike. It’s the connective tissue of ordinary life out here. Which is exactly why a week of daytime lane closures is worth a heads-up rather than a shrug.

The plan: leave early, loop around

The county’s advice is the sensible kind: plan ahead, take an alternate route where you can, and give yourself plenty of time. If you’re heading eastbound in the work window, that likely means looping up toward the Pike or dropping down through the side streets you already know if you’ve lived here long enough. The folks in the orange vests will be out there from early morning to early evening, which covers both the school-and-work rush and the late-afternoon scramble, so there isn’t really a magic hour that dodges it.

This is what functioning local government actually looks like — a county quietly keeping the pavement under our tires from falling apart.Max Cedar

Somebody surveyed that road, somebody budgeted it, and this week somebody’s going to stand in the August heat and do the work so that the drive is smoother in September. That’s worth a little patience and maybe a wave out the window.

So set the alarm five minutes earlier. Pack the patience along with the travel mug. And if you find yourself idling a minute longer than usual between Audubon and Haddon Heights this week, remember it’s temporary — and that the whole point is a better ride down a road most of us are lucky enough to take for granted.

Based on reporting from Camden County, NJ and GloucesterCityNews.net.