If they already have the ROW, what is stopping them? Surely a handful of business owners in an otherwise insignificant wide spot in the road can't have THAT much clout in Harrisburg or DC.
As a driver who has to navigate Breezewood on a regular basis I've always been interested in it. I was told years ago that it was written into the Defense Highway act that a direct connection there was forbidden. Maybe it is just an urban legend.
No, the original Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 (a/k/a National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (Public Law 84-627)) did not fund "direct" connections between already-built toll roads like the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the then-new "free" Interstates like I-70 east (really south) of Breezewood. That is why there were breezewoods along many of the toll roads in the East and Midwest, including the N.Y. State Thruway (a breezewood at I-84/Newburgh was only recently remediated), the N.J. Turnpike (there's a breezewood between Turnpike Exits 2 and 3 where there is no connection to I-76/N.J. 42 (and the ACE)) and the Ohio Turnpike (several breezewoods along the Ohio Turnpike were remediated over the past 10 or 20 years).
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From what I read, it was a little more complicated than "not funding direct connections." The original statute said that federal funding could be used to build a direct connection "to a point where such project will have some use irrespective of its use for such toll road, bridge, or tunnel." Apparently the FHWA interpreted this as meaning that if federal dollars had been used to bypass Breezewood, the PTC would have had to agree to stop collecting tolls once the bonds were retired, and the PTC refused. The PTC could have paid for a direct connection itself, of course, but didn't. The law has since been amended.
The only time I've ever stopped in Breezewood was at the McDonald's on top of the hill there on Boy Scout trips to Seven Springs when I was a kid, and that was a function of (a) I wasn't driving and the adults decided to stop there; and (b) when there were seven or eight cars full of Boy Scouts making the trip from the DC area, Breezewood WAS a logical place to stop to regroup to confirm nobody got lost or anything like that. Nowadays if I'm coming back down the Turnpike from the west my inclination is to exit at Bedford and take either US-220 to the Cumberland area (I-68) or US-30 east to I-70, simply because the Breezewood toll plaza can be a bottleneck. The one exception to that was last year on the way home from the Winter Classic in Pittsburgh. While we sat in a 15- to 20-minute backup due to the toll plaza, the number of cars flying Capitals flags and stuff and beeping horns in celebration of the win made it fun.