LA has the worst, but the Inland Empire can lay claim to the 215/91/60 interchange in Riverside. This was an acceptable (barely) interchange in 1965, but it can in no way handle the traffic it has today. Not to mention that the traffic getting onto the 91 has to weave through the traffic getting off the 91, all in the space of maybe 200 feet. Traffic is usually backed up at least a half mile 20 hours of the day. They are rebuilding it, but that will take another year or so to complete. In the meantime…
I always thought I-605 and I-10 Interchange had a fun feature to it.
The 605 is going N-S and the 10 E-W. If you look on the right where the two cross you see how the traffic going W on the 10 changing to go S on th 605 must interact with the foks going S on the 605 wanting to go E on the 10. They are both coming into the interchange in single lanes,and each lane of traffic must get into the others lane of traffic. And they only have about 100 yards to do it.
For Britain I recommend http://www.cbrd.co.uk/badjunctions/
Brock Road, not Brock Street. 
Brock Street is Highway 12, the main north-south street through Whitby. Brock Road is a regional road quite a bit further west.
I had to carefully clarify this to my university friends visiting Whitby from Waterloo during the summer.
Yeah, that one sucks.
I’ll also toss in the 17 North to 85 North interchange. It’s actually two interchanges, and you have to change lanes on each. Pain in the ass, and I’d imagine it’s a huge clusterfuck at rush hour.
New Jersey used to have the worst in the world. The Somerville circle . Rt 202, Rt 206, Rt 22 and Rt 28 all meet in one big clusterfuck of a traffic circle. The chariot race in Ben Hur was more civilized. Fortunately they pumped a bizzilion dollars into improving it and now it isn’t nearly as bad. It’s not exactly a circle anymore, Rt 202 is now elevated through it. It is still pretty bad. I would now nominate the Flemington circle. Rt 202, Rt 31 and Rt 12 meeting at one traffic circle. Not nearly as bad as the old Somerville circle because the traffic volume is not nearly as bad.
Yeah, I came here to mention the “mixing bowl” on 95 by Springfield. Complete monster any time of day or night.
In Florida, we have Malfunction Junction.
It’s even worse than I described when you’re coming from the west, from San Francisco to the East Bay. Going west, it at least only splits into two freeways. Going east, it splits into four (80, 880, 580, and 24) in fairly quick succession. And the signs for which lanes you want for which freeway don’t show up until a short distance before the split. It’s a titanic confusing-as-hell clusterf***, and I avoid it whenever possible. Would it kill them to have signs letting people know which lane they want to be in a little ways in advance?
I’ll throw in the old 880/17/101 interchange, though I think they have improved it by now (I don’t drive down there very often any more since I moved from Santa Cruz in 2001). Where 17 turned into 880, at the junction with the 101, there were only two thru lanes in each direction for 880. It wasn’t nearly as confusing as the Maze, but it was always a huge traffic mess.
I hate to think of what this was like before it was improved. A few years ago I was helping a friend move from Wichita to Boise and we passed through this very interchange. I was westbound on I-70 turning north onto I-25. I was driving a 17’ U-Haul truck right at the peak of the evening rush hour traffic. I had been advised from someone who had traveled here to watch clsoely for the turn as it’s easy to miss. In spite of this advisory I still nearly missed it. I had to veer back onto the ramp and was fortunate to have a courteous driver behind me let me back in.
As for our area, they’ve made improvements to I-84, which now runs 4 lanes each side from Meridian through the western half of Boise to exit 52. The eastern half is still two lanes each side and traffic is always clogged (that, and the roadbed is in serious need of resurfacing). Plans to widen this stretch have been put off in favor of expanding the lanes west of exit 44 (Meridian) through to Nampa, where the highway is currently only two lanes on each side.
Yep, the whole twisted mess of exits and ramps on the south side of downtown is terrible. When approaching downtown Seattle from the south, grip the wheel tightly and scream. You know that segment from Willy Wonka where they go through the psychedelic tunnel with images of bombs, death, and beheaded chickens? It’s just like that, except the road doesn’t even have the decency to be made out of chocolate. When finally regurgitated out from under the city, enjoy a blissful happy drive to the north.
Vote 4 for the Maze, and I almost never use it - only when coming from the Richmond San Rafael bridge to 880 south. I think I’ve been on the Bay Bridge maybe twice in the 11 years I’ve lived in the Bay Area, because I want to avoid this mess.
Up until a few months ago I would have nominated the 880 / Mission Blvd interchange, which is jammed about 20 hours a day, It still sucks going North, but going South eliminating the merge from Mission has helped a ton.
For you lucky non Bay Area people, we have a wonderful time debating which of about a dozen bad interchanges is worse. I used to live in NJ and went through the Somerville and Flemington circles, and, trust me, it’s worse out here.
The entire city of Boston.
I spent a weekend there, actually outside the city in Marlboro.
I went to the art museum one day- getting there was easy, getting back wasn’t. The return trip didn’t work for the same reason that funnels don’t work in reverse. Lots of roads splitting off, no road signs.
I went to the computer museum one day, it’s all the way east at the water’s edge IIRC. Downtown Boston’s roads were just crazy. You whip around on a highway, go under a couple buildings, exit left to a traffic circle, and end up heading to Rhode Island on a double-decker bridge with no opportunity to turn around.
Crazy city with streets designed by Satan himself.
Oh Good Lord. I worked on a case once that required me to commute to Riverside daily for about four months. I made the mistake of hitting that interchange ONCE. And only once. :rolleyes:
I have to say I’m amused by Darryl Lict’s post, by the way. Everyone makes fun of Angelinos for refering to “the” 405 and “the” 101, but as soon as I saw “the PCH,” I immediately cringed. Not the same! Does not compute! 
The PCH? The 405? The 101? Sounds completely normal to me. But then I’m from Ontario. 
The 101, the 110, and the 10 all pretty much come together at the same place, then the 5 cuts across the two latter for form a triangle of pure gridlock from 0600 to 2100.
Oh, is that what they are doing? I thought they were just building a monster roller coaster over the highway… (Riverside residents will know what I’m talking about).
But seriously, the West Coast has nothing on the Eastern Seaboard, and Boston in particular, which is just one big quantum mass of statistically unpredictable Brownian motion. I understand the kids at MIT AI lab once tried to create a neural network algorithm to model traffic in the Boston/Cambridge area, but the computer refused to continue and started killing off programmers one by one until someone pulled out its core memory and disabled its higher cognative processes.
Stranger
It’s not there anymore, but the aptly-named Can of Worms intersection with (IIRC) I-390 and I-490 outside Rochester, NY was an unholy mess, with people wishing to stay on their initial road having to cross over the other interstate. They would’ve done better to put in a traffic light – there were backups on both interstates, and in both directions, since they had the same problem going the other way. Circa 1982 they tore it down and rebuilt it rationally, without the “crossing traffic” part.
Come on people, let’s have some Google sat-pict links to these things.
Well, they DID say that North End streets were laid out along cow paths.
The real evil of Boston and Boston-area roads:
1.) Usually only one street at an intersection has a sign. If you’re on a major road, it’s presumed that you know which one it is. (Ha!)
2.) Even major roads aren’t necessarily marked. Everyone’s heard of rte. 128 (or at least they used to – it was the “technology highway”), but if you’re coming off of Rte 93 they don’t tell you that the major intersection coming up is 128 – they say it’s I-95. Not until you’re right atop the intersection does an apologetic, last-minute sign tell you that , “Oh, yeah – it’s also 128”, making you swerve to get in the exit lane.
And just when you figured out that I-95 and Masachusetts 128 are the same road, you find out they aren’t. They coincide most of the loop around Boston, but they separate both north and south of the city. If you’re going to Gloucester, you want 128, not I-95.
3.) They keep changing the route itself. I had an old map of North of Boston showing the local Route 60. The modern Route 60 doesn’t follow the same path. The roads are still there, but some of them aren’t part of 60 anymore, and ones that weren’t 60 before now are.
4.) We won’t tell you in advance which roads are one way, or which way they go.
5.) There are no right angles. You can go around four successive corners and not be facing the same way you started out. The outline of the Boston Common does this, but so do other. not-so–obvious polygons.
6.) Massachusetts, unlike, say, New Jersey, still has its traffic circles. They’re called rotaries, and some are huge, while others are tiny. Nobody knows the correct traffic rules for them, and in some cases, if you tried to follow the correct rules, you’d be hit.
I-90 & SR 2, Cleveland, OH. From what I understand, the plan was to reroute I-90 along the lakefront, down past the sewage treatment plant, then follow the railroad down to Lakewood Heights where it would link back to the old route. Contruction only got as far as Edgewater Park, leaving I-90 with a 90° turn where it meets SR 2.