I’ve driven throughout many states in the Western US and have come to the conclusion that the worst drive is a tie between I-80 through Nebraska and I-5 from LA to Redding.
I-80 through Nebraska is 450 miles of primarily cornfields punctuated every 25 miles with truck stops. It primarily follows the Platte River Valley, so there are absolutely no hills to speak of and every exit seems to have a state trooper with a radar gun. Probably the worst stretch is the 90 mile stretch between Grand Island and Lincoln which is ruler strait. The only roadside attraction to speak of is the Platte River Road Archway near Kearny (it was in the movie ‘About Schmidt’)
I-5, a 600 mile trek between LA and Redding is a grueling nightmare too. The worst stretch is between Grapevine, south of LA and Sacramento. It basically follows the base of the coastal range on the West side of the valley, so you have monotonous, treeless hills on one side and orchards and vineyards on the other (with a huge, smelly feedlot on the middle of the trip). In the wintertime you get thick heavy tule fogs with visibility of a hood length or less. Huge pileups happen in the wintertime quite frequently. Traffic can also be quite heavy with a lot of trucks, so just setting the cruise control and going is not an option for long stretches.
Denver to Hays is pretty darn tedious on the freeway. You see that rise in the distance and you know that once you crest it in about 20 minutes, you will see another roll in the plains almost exactly like it and this will continue for hundreds of miles.
Just, stay off the freeway. We took the main road through the Oklahoma Appendage and while it was not terribly interesting, it was nowhere near as bad as that freeway.
Tedious I can handle; by cheating. I let my wife do those and she is very good at it. For worst, at least for a stranger, I would say the DC or Baltimore beltways. Both have some utterly crazy drivers, confusing exits, and if you miss an exit you are pretty much just screwed unless you know the area.
LA to Sacramento, Denver to Hays (and really Denver to Kansas City), and the DC/Baltimore freeways are all bad. I’d add:
Boston. Just…Boston.
I-75 from Gainesville to Almost Miami. Bad for scenery AND for the other drivers, who are either going 100 mph or 40 (and often 40 in the passing lane and 100 in the slow lane).
Do bridges make you nervous even in the slightest? Give US-1 from Miami to Key West a miss then. I think I lost a gallon of sweat by the time I made it back.
I-40 through West Texas was insanely boring, particularly as we neared Amarillo and were assaulted by a thick fog that smelled like urine. Just flat, boring nothingness for eternity. My mother said I-70 through Kansas was much the same and she wanted to commit suicide about halfway across.
My least favorite stretch of road, though, is I-95 around the GW Bridge. I constantly feel as if I’m either going to be smashed to a pancake between two trucks merging into each other, suffocate in exhaust fumes, or pick a bad lane and somehow wind up lost in Washington Heights or at the bottom of the Hudson. Horrible. I will drive an extra hour to avoid that span of road.
I can understand how some would think the Capital Beltway sucks, but having lived here most of my life, learned to drive on it, etc., it’s too familiar to really bother me.
I-70 from eastern Indiana through Ohio into PA. Once you hit W.VA, it gets a lot better, but the horizontal cross through Ohio is terrible. We live in Indy now, so it’s all we can do. When we lived farther south in IN, we would take 71 south down to Cincinnati, and then take SR 46 home, instead of SR 37. If 71 had traffic, it might add 15 minutes to the drive, but we were coming back from PA, or New York, or DC, or something, so what was 15 minutes? for some reason, 71 is way more scenic than 70.
Interstate 80 basically follows the old Oregon and California Trails, so there’s at least some interesting history if you get off occasionally.
I’d think one of the ridiculously long unpaved roads in northern Canada might be a good contender. Extremely limited services, usually pretty dicey road surface and often heavy truck and wildlife traffic. Some of them like the Demptster at least go somewhere interesting, but the impression I get of, say, the Trans-Taiga is that it’s about 650 kilometers of crummy road leading absolutely nowhere passing by absolutely nothing.
I agree with the OP. I’d rather take any other route than those two. Another killer is I-94 through North Dakota, especially in winter. Nearly arrow-straight, flat, featureless, and as boring as your mother in law.
driving 402-401 from Point Edward to Toronto. Cross the blue water bridge and it’s all straight highway from there. Nothing, nothing, nothing, London, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, Brantford (Wayne Gretzky is big there,) nothing, etc.
I-10 for much of west Texas is pretty boring, but as for the worst, I would agree with the OP on I-5. “Grueling nightmare” could not be a more apt description of that drive.
Never been on 80 but there are stretches of I-95 in Florida and Georgia that are interminable, with an unending series of the same pine trees forever with not even the relief of crossing a hill to break the monotony.
Los Cruces Rd in Arizona is parallel to the border, I took it once and ended up without gas in Mexico (turned off on a side road I thought would take me to the interstate); got arrested by Federales and got my car impounded (never got it back); got released a month later after many phone calls (illegal entry + a reefer= jail in mexico) and much work from family here in the US.
MORAL OF THE STORY: DONT TRUST YOUR GPS! IT WILL TRY TO KILL YOU!