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A 1950 state Highway Planning Commission survey reported that over 17,000 cars per day traveled the 36-foot-wide Tilghman St. during 1949, and the situation was similar on other local roads. Perhaps hyperbolically, the Highway Planning Commision lamented that "Free traffic movements are virtually impossible during the day." To remedy the snarl, the Highway Planning Commission recommended that "a limited access four-lane bypass should be provided as soon as possible for U.S. 22 around Allentown and Bethlehem and a new approach to the toll bridge over the Delaware River constructed through Easton." Following the Commission's direction, the older William Penn Highway or U.S. 22 was upgraded into the Lehigh Valley Throughway in 1952. Skirting the northern fringes of the cities, the highway became a new locus for commercial and residential development. The Throughway directly spurred the explosive commercial growth of the Seventh Street-MacArthur Road corridor in Allentown and Whitehall Townships and the Schoenersville Road corridor north of Bethlehem.[10] The Throughway combined with increased automobile ownership to decimate rider ship on the bus lines of the Lehigh Valley Transit Company. By 1971, the Lehigh Valley Transit Company filed for bankruptcy, by then carrying only 5 percent of its 1950 annual rider ship of 50 million.[11]
The Lehigh Valley also became a node in the evolving interstate highway program in the mid-1950s. Even before the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, the east-west Pennsylvania Turnpike was building the Northeast Extension to link Philadelphia with Scranton. When the first stretch of the road opened in November 1955, its northern terminus was the Lehigh Valley Interchange located a few milts northwest of Allentown. While some suggested the Extension had minimal impact on the valley, for the struggling coal communities of northeastern Pennsylvania, the completed highway offered new job opportunities in the Lehigh Valley's booming postwar industries.[12] The construction of the larger interstate system further created economic linkages, expanded the region's labor pool, and reconfigured the spatial patterns of industry and commerce. Businesses such as the F. & M. Shaeffer Brewing Company, Kraft Foods, and General Electric relocated to greenfield sites at interchanges and highway intersections to take full advantage of freight transportation by truck.[13] As much of the nation's freight shifted from rail to truck, the Lehigh Valley Throughway became overcrowded and outmoded. To separate local from through traffic, a southern by-pass highway, Interstate 78, was planned to carry through traffic around the metropolitan area. Political disputes over the actual route of the highway delayed its construction for over a decade. When it was completed in 1990, I-78 created a new regional network, especially with New Jersey's I-287, that prompted thousands of people in the New York metropolitan area to move into the Lehigh Valley, to take advantage of the lower cost of living. Many of these people now commute two hours or more by bus or car.
