Around here, when traffic reports are being read on the radio it’s almost impossible to know what part of town is being referred to. We have three major roads, I-65 N-S, I-40 E-W, and I-24 (NW-SE usually treated as E-W because it’s an even-numbered road).
The confusion comes in such statements as “northbound 65” which could mean the lanes headed into town from the south or out of town toward the north. Until and unless some other street or road or landmark is mentioned there’s no information of value exchanged.
Is it that way in your area or are there smarter traffic reports where you operate?
If I were an out-of-towner, I might get confused - but everyone local knows that the heavy traffic rolls north and west in the morning and south and east in the afternoon.
Which, of course, for the most part means that the traffic in the morning is always heavy on north-bound I-35, so why bother with a report?
Roadgeeks such as myself gnash our teeth at the US’s inexactitude in these problems. I know of two successful solutions in other countries. In Halifax, NS, Canada the directions of the main roads into the city are simply called “Inbound” and “Outbound”…no cardinal direction needed or asked for. And around London, the M25 Orbital’s directions are “Clockwise” and “Anticlockwise” (aka counterclockwise). Makes a whole lot more sense than having the cardinal directions switch every 90 degrees, as US beltways try to do.
It occurs to me now that all the names (not necessarily the numbers) for the highways in Montreal are radial, that is, they don’t cross through the city, so “northbound” and “southbound” (etc.) are meaningful.
(With the possible exception of the Trans-Canada, but if the traffic reporter says, “backing to before the Anjou interchange” you know s/he means on your way in to town from the east, since the Anjou interchange is east of the centre.)
This is helped by the fact that several of the ways into town are bridges (well, all of them, we’re on an island, but since a lot of people come in from the West Island and the east end, that generates its own traffic right on the island.)
I recall from my years in Toronto, that traffic reports always began with the road being reported on, and included a point or points on that road. This helped fix where any problems were. Some samples that would be similar to what I heard on my daily commute for years:
“401 westbound, moving well from Martin Grove, but collectors has problems at the Allen interchange, traffic is backed up to Keele. Stay in express if you can through the Allen. 401 eastbound, express and collectors moving well across the top of Metro, but new problems reported near the 400 interchange, we’re heading over for a look and will let you know; in the meantime, consider an alternate, Sheppard and Finch look good.”
“Parkway northbound moving slowly from Eglinton up to York Mills, no problems, it’s just volume.”
“Gardiner westbound, problems at the Yonge exit, traffic backed up to Spadina.”
Without points on the road being mentioned, it would be very confusing. “401 westbound moving slowly” means nothing, since the road is so long. Where is it moving slowly? It would seem that points on the road have to be mentioned, if the report is to make any sense.
Or just as bad, around Nashville, when they do that, then use Old Hickory Blvd.* for reference.
*For those not local, OHB is the road that starts and runs for a relatively short distance before ending, only to pick up somewhere in another part of town to do the same. Several times.
In Chicago, each leg of an interstate has a name (e.g. Dan Ryan, Kennedy, Edens). Traffic reporters use these names and the service tends to report them in the same order as well.
But as a non-native good luck trying to figure out which one is which. They don’t mention the highway number on the traffic reports and few of the highways have any signage on them telling you their name.
What I like with traffic reports is when they mention traffic issues around a feature someone gave a nickname to: Chicago has “The Circle” and “The Junction” Denver has(d) “The Mousetrap.” Good luck trying to figure out what they’re talking about while you’re driving.
I think the system is optimized for locals since they are the primary users. But it is a valid point; transplants and even locals have to learn the names at some point. Years ago, one of the local radio stations passed out a traffic-oriented map of the local interstates. It showed only the interstates (labelled with both name and number) as well as their exits. Once I started commuting, that was my key to getting a handle on the traffic reports.
Personally I wish the traffic report only included the routes that were worse than usual for that particular time of day. If a section always takes 45 minutes at 8 am, then don’t report it unless there was an accident and now it is taking an extra 15 minutes. It seems like the reports would be a lot shorter.
Boston has many road oddities of course and there are some strange ones for the main highways. I-95 North and I-93 South are the same road for a stretch south of the city. It can be very confusing trying to figure out what is happening if you don’t know to look for it. There is also this concept of “128” that people use all the time in preference of the real modern road terms. 128 is more of a concept than an actual road and it is an old concept at that. It is comprised of long stretches of other major roads these days and the part closest to the city is I-95. People from other areas would expect Bostonians to use I-95 as the common designator but they tend to prefer 128 and throw it out there like everyone understands that from birth. The designator 128 is on some I-95 signs but not others. The Massachusetts Turnpike is also I-90 but that isn’t as bad because it is a toll road and the dual naming gives different information.
Well of course it’s unclear if your radio stations persist in referring to them in this way. They’re still thinking like a small town. CaveMike mentioned Chicago, and if you look at the labels from this satellite image of central L.A., you’ll see that they give proper names to certain parts, so that a regular commuter who is familiar with the area will know that, for example, the “Golden State” Freeway is that part of the 5 which is north of downtown (the “Santa Ana” is that part which is south). The 110 will be the “Harbor Freeway,” the “Arroyo Seco Freeway,” or the “Pasadena Freeway,” depending on which area.
One proper name, in fact–“The Stack”–has now become a common noun in freeway parlance.
But really, do you actually expect to benefit from traffic reports? They’re really just a gimmick to keep you tuned to the station. By the time you hear of a problem, you’re already inextricably in the middle of it, trapped by the freeway’s limited egress.
The superhighways around here aren’t really all that confusing, but a friend recently pointed out that it’s perfectly valid to tell someone that you’re traveling south on East Northwest Highway.
In the Bay Area anyway one might be confused because the same road is given different names by the traffic people depending which part of it they are talking about. I880 is usually called the Nimitz (its official name) around Oakland, and the Corridor near where I live. They also give landmarks - Hospital Curve for I80 in San Francisco, the maze for the section where a few roads join to cross the Bay Bridge going West, and the Cats for an area of I17 in the mountains.
“Inbound I-10 from the east” meaning I-10 West between Lake Pontchartrain and the Central Business District.
“Inbound Pontchartrain Expressway” meaning I-10 East between the I-610 split and the CBD (called that because it runs where Pontchartrain Blvd. ran many decades ago).
“Eastbound on the spillway” meaning the section of I-10 that goes over the Bonnet Carré Spillway between LaPlace and Kenner.
It’s all pretty self-explanatory if you know a little about the geography.
The worst thing we have (and if you’re a roadgeek, you’ll appreciate the stupidity of this) is U.S. 90 runs through the middle of the city on the surface with a signal at every corner most of the way through New Orleans and U.S. 90 Business (90B) runs through a suburb and is Interstate compliant elevated expressway when you get within 9 miles of New Orleans. This confuses out-of-towners because they expect the “Business” part to be in the city, not the bypass.
The logical thing is for traffic reports to be strictly for the locals. If out-of-towners are not a subordinate life form, your city is not big enough to matter.
It is but it is still more of a concept though. People from other parts of the country would expect the I-95 name to take priority over an older route that has been largely taken by more major highways but it doesn’t work that way in practice especially among older people. I stand by my conviction that you have to study Boston history in depth before you can navigate around well at all. Some references go back to things generations before that don’t exist anymore but that isn’t important because people that don’t know that shouldn’t be driving here in the first place.
Milwaukee has “The Marquette Interchange” that might be confusing if you don’t know where Marquette is. It’s right on the interstate, though, so it’d be hard to stay too confused for long.
Here in Minneapolis, we have 35E and 35W, which is very weird because I-35 is a N-S highway, as you’d expect. Instead of putting in a bypass (which would marginalize one of the Twin Cities, and was very much not on), they split I-35 so that the W branch goes through Minneapolis, while the E branch goes through St. Paul. I-35 divides way down south of the metro, then meets up again north of it.
And I’m also embarrassed to admit how long it was after I moved here until I figured out that “the Crosstown” referred to Hwy 62. It’s just “the Crosstown;” reports never referred to the highway number, and I was just lost.
