When one state has to clean up another state's mess

[Chris19001]

At least US-202 in New Jersey (up to I-287, never been north of there on 202) flows a lot better than US-202 in Pennsylvania, in my experience.

It is a 4-lane divided highway with at least some access management.

The portions in question in PA have 2 lanes and no access management.

Bear in mind there is a nice freeway in NJ for the first several miles of 202 until Ringoes...  I do not think it would have been difficult at the time to extend it further towards Somerville if PA had done much of anything on its side.  Its now pretty much a lost cause with the sprawl that developed from the pharma corridor after Flemington.
The PA side is just a joke though.  New Hope to Lehaska is jammed most any day of the year for the Peddlers Village center..

[MikieTimT]

I don't know much about the bypass, but from what I can tell it looks like Arkansas is making the mess and Missouri will have to clean it up.

It does look like that on the ground, but I think most people familiar with the story might say the mess-making goes in the other direction.  Arkansas was committed to building it while Missouri postponed construction and removed funding from its STIP a few years ago, putting Arkansas in the position of having to build an interim facility (two lanes expandable to four), while Missouri has built nothing except a ramp stub.

I think I actually just happened upon Missouri's stub ramp while browsing Street View in the area.
I get the impression, from news articles and other sources, that there are few Missourians that see the need for the facility, while there's been an understandably much stronger push from Arkansas.
I still wonder why Arkansas didn't just build four lanes from the outset; a full freeway would make the gap much more glaring, hopefully prompting (or perhaps embarassing) Missouri into taking action.

Arkansas for the most part is a pay-as-you-go state, which, given that it's almost always close to the bottom on wealth, means that progress has always been rather slow on projects here and tend to get done piecemeal as funds permit.  It has kept Arkansas from becoming the fiscal mess that other states have gotten themselves into, but has resulted in some slow progress on major projects in the past.  What has changed in the last couple of decades has been a couple of voter-approved bond issues where fractional cent sales tax increases have been enacted to retire the bonds, with sunset provisions on those taxes.  It has worked rather well in a poor state like Arkansas where we have actually taxed ourselves in return for getting to specify where that tax money went to, and an official retirement of that tax.  Rarely happens anywhere else, but it has resulted in some rather dramatic improvements to the Interstate system over the last couple of decades compared to where it was in the 90's.

What happened with the Bella Vista Bypass is that Missouri had the money to go to the state line when they were doing the grade separations on US-71 to have it promoted to I-49, but given the development around Bella Vista, everything south of the stub had to be new terrain through limestone hills.  Arkansas didn't have the money allocated at that time to meet them at the line, so they improved US-71 down to Bella Vista instead and left the stub.  Then they moved their money to other needs around the state.  Arkansas 2-3 years later got funding firmed up to at least get a Super-2 facility to the state line, which would still be a dramatic improvement over 9 stoplights in Bella Vista.  The Connecting Arkansas Program has enabled a lot of road construction in NorthWest Arkansas to finally catch up with the growth, so this corner of the state is finally getting some attention after decades of neglect from the powers in Little Rock.  The Fayetteville/Springdale/Rogers metropolitan area has rapidly grown to almost Top-100 now, so it's bleeding into the bordering counties along the federal highways now.  Lot's of folks in McDonald County, Missouri work for Wal-Mart/Tyson/JB Hunt and it makes rush hour in Bella Vista, which was originally a quiet little retirement village, very congested in rush hour.

Arkansas is now working on the other 2 lanes along where they have almost completed the Super-2, which is 3 miles shy of the border, so that embarrassing gap is getting pushed onto Missouri now.  And now it's Missouri who can't come up with any money and is having to rely on Arkansas putting in requests for federal grants on their behalf, although Missouri's residents working in NWA and thru I-49 traffic are the ones that are really the most in need for the bypass in the first place.

Any now, since Missouri voters rejected their awkwardly proposed gas tax increase on the ballot, any light at the end of the tunnel for this stretch to get finished just became a little dimmer.  Maybe some bipartisan infrastructure proposals from the incoming Congress, which will struggle to accomplish anything over the next 2 years.

In the meantime, Arkansas is moving dirt on the other 2 lanes.  The current Super-2 road is at least a speedy way to get to clinics in Gravette and western Bella Vista from the south and has a surprising amount of traffic already to not have a major northern termination point.  Most everyone exits/enters at the northern AR-72 exit, so Gravette and the west side of Bella Vista seem to have discovered it.