This thread is quite illuminating. I don’t think many Americans realise how easy they’ve got it.
In Sydney, we are only now getting our system of orbital freeways completed, as planned fifty years ago. Except now, they’re tollways, of course - expensive ones. Even these motorways are generally only two lanes in each direction. For most of my driving life (and all of my parents’) a driving commute in Sydney meant using one of the arterial roads, and facing fifty sets of lights across town was not unheard of.
The main highway between our two biggest cities (Sydney and Melbourne) still has a little bit of single lane blacktop. The main highway west of the city (to the rest of the continent) has a lot of this, and also some curves posted at about 15mph.
We don’t complain about our interchanges because we’ve only got a couple of 'em, and they are still a novelty.
I live in the East Bay and have work sites in both Marin & SF and I don’t think this is so bad at all. The key is that the 80/580 split is 3 lanes each, so if you take the outside lane of either (depending on which way you want to go), you usually avoid the worst of the clogging and congestion coming from the City. Sure, it’s still bad, but nowhere as bad as LA.
It’s not an interchange, but I think the 101S (to SF) in the morning and the 101N (from SF) starting mid-afternoon is worse than anything that’s usually around the Bay Bridge (except when they’re doing lane closings for construction). Again, in a lot of the Bay Area there are lots of frontage roads, side onramps, FastTrak options, and creative thinking that can circumvent these problems (especially if you know when you should and shouldn’t be approaching certain areas and plan your time appropriately). No such luck in LA–it’s generally worse to start with, plus more random and unpredictable for longer stretches of time (plus, the drivers are worse down there, too).
I second both comments about the 401… pretty much any interchange involving the 401 is a clusterfuck… the only things worse are the interchanges for all the other 400 series highways in the Toronto area!
I used to drive in to Mississauga from Hamilton, and I always thought the 403/QEW/407 split was pretty fucked up. It was very easy to get confused the first few times (403? QEW? Wait, how did I get to Ikea?)
The 403 exit onto… well, the 403 tends to screw people up, because suddenly you’re heading North, not West, and oh, shit, how the hell did I end up on Ford Drive?
It’s a pretty smooth ride, traffic wise, but to get onto the 132 WEST when coming off the Jacques-Cartier bridge from Montreal, you actually have to head EAST geographically. Well, technically, you’re going more north… because everything is oriented with respect to the island, and the island didn’t line itself up with the cardinal directions very well. So if you have a good sense of direction with respect to north/south/east/west, you can get very confused and lost very easily when you’re trying to find your way based on road names!
It must be what each of us are used to. I find that clueless and crazy are easily predictable, and I can compensate with little effort. Arrogant I respond to with arrogance and it just escalates. Give me the 10 at rush hour any day over the 880 through Alameda, for example.
I’ll admit that the first thing I thought of was Fresh Pond Circle, when I saw the thread title. I know you’d mentioned the old Can O’ Worms (Actually, it was the 490-590 interchange) and it was a mess - no question about it. However, whatever one might say against the drivers in Rochester - they lack the je ne sais quois that defines the true Boston-area driver. So, the Can always seemed just a minor hassle, not the sort of mess most locals called it.
It’s all what you’re used to, I guess.
(Part of the reason for my blase attitude was that for three years I had to take exit two off I-190 in Worcester, to get to Norton Ave. Which shouldn’t be much of a problem, one might think, but… The exit actually dropped people to a stop sign before they could get into the right hand lane of Rt 12, IIRC, also known as Goldstar Boulevard. The actual exit to Norton Ave was 500 feet down Goldstar - on the left side of the road. The road, at that point, is one half of an eight lane divided highway. Or to put it another way: There were four lanes of maniacal Eastern Massachusetts rush hour drivers to get through to get to the proper road. From a dead stop, while traffic never breaks.)
I’ve driven Orlando, DC, NYC, Virginia Beach/Tidewater, LA, Frisco and Boston. And all of them can be crazy drives. But the only place I’m afraid to drive is Boston. That’s what the T’s for.
I’m a Bay Area driver who braved (and got lost in) Boston a couple of years ago. I confess to being the worst driver in Boston on that particular day. Taking the wrong offramp can lead to an afternoon of adventure, I’ll tell you!
And is there any logical reason why anyone east of the Blue Ridge Mountains wanting to take an interstate route from any point north of the Potomac to any point south of it has to be routed on I-95 and the Baltimore and Washington beltways? I would venture to guess that over 100,000 vehicles a week use I-95 and the two beltways, not because they’re going anywhere in the Washington-Baltimore area, but because there is no freeway alternative signed for thru traffic east of Harpers Ferry.
Damn right. When I was in college we used to go to Mondo’s, then go to an all night bakery in the North End, and eat the doughnuts in a cemetery. My roommate liked to give directions to visitors we took here, which always involved a left turn impossible to make in one try. I don’t know of any other intersection in the US that bad.
Being from New York, with nice rectangular parks, I always got lost around the Common until I read a paper by Marvin Minsky about frames. He said he always got lost there also (he’s from NY) because his frame for a park had four sides.
When did NJ do away with circles. I lived near the Pennington Circle on 31, got hit in it, in fact. 10 years ago there were plenty.
The Fudge books by Judy Blume talk about a circle at Harrison Street and Rte 1 in Princeton, which happily was gone by the time I moved to Princeton. So maybe they got rid of all of them.
Nope they are still here. As I mentioned upthread (see post 26) some have been modified like the Somerville circle. The Pennington circle is still there and so is the Circle Liquor Store if you remember it. I went through that circle a couple of times last weekend. The Flemington circle is still there and unchanged. I’m not sure how many are still around.
My selection is not in a big city and is actually a series of interchanges involving one highway: US 395 through Kennewick and Pasco, Washington. Going north, the worst stretch starts starts with US 395’s interchange with SR 240 where one has to quickly avoid ending up either back in Kennewick or heading toward Richland. However, there’s no rest once you pass that test since you suddenly then have to cross the Columbia River on the Pioneer Memorial Bridge (a.k.a., “The Blue Bridge”). It’s four lanes but they’re narrow and you have to make sure to be in the right lane because once you get off the bridge, there’s one of those rare and infuriating left-lane exits for West Lewis Street that has taken many an unwary driver into beautiful downtown Pasco against their will. About a couple miles after this trap, US 395 runs into I-182/US 12 where a newly-built exit onto Argent Road will no doubt confuse more motorists trying to get onto to eastbound I-182. US 395 shares its route with I-182 for a few miles before diverging at a deceptively ordinary cloverleaf north of Pasco. I say “deceptively ordinary” because if a driver wants to follow US 395 north, he has to first merge right into a single exit lane which becomes a double exit lane as it passes beneath US 395 when the cloverleaf lane exiting southbound US 395 for eastbound US 12 joins it. You have to quickly merge from the left exit lane onto the new right exit lane (and hope there are no 18-wheelers next to you) if you want to turn off onto northbound US 395. If you don’t, you’re going to end up in Walla Walla. (Once you got onto northbound US 395, the freeway used to literally come to a dead stop a mile later at traffic light at Hillsboro Street. But, fortunately, the WSDOT wisely remedied this problem by installing an interchange.)
Since I’ve been on US 395 through the Tri-Cities many times, I am now able to handle all the constant turning off and merging like a pro. Yet, to many drivers who are not familiar with the area, these interchanges are often a confusing challenge.
I nominate the I80/I680 and I80/Hwy 75(Kennedy Freeway) interchanges in Omaha.
Travelling north on I80-680, approaching the interchange with 680, you need to continue northbound to stay on 680.Your eye tells you north is straight ahead, but your eye is WRONG. The idiot engineers, who don’t know the meaning of intuitive, have put the ramp to 80 eastbound straight ahead. In order to continue northbound, you must jog to the right -or east -first.
At the Kennedy/80 interchange, in order to continue travelling north on Kennedy, you jog west. Continue in a straight path and you find yourself on the ramp to I80 westbound–which first jogs a bit east before curving west. Interestingly, they got the ramp to I80 eastbound right as it clearly and unambiguously sends you eastbound-no jogs or veers in other directions.
All of this shit works better,ergonomically, in pitch-dark conditions. In daylight, when you can see the sun and your eye tells you north has to be straight ahead, it gets confusing.
People who use these roads daily still have “AH shit!” moments where they find themselves going east or west when they wanted north, or vice versa. It’s a huge time waster to have to drive a mile to the nearest exit, sit at the light at the end of the off-ramp, then at the light at the base of the on-ramp to backtrack and try to figure it out all over again.
And to make 80/Kennedy all the more interesting, the ramp to 80 westbound off Kennedy is ALMOST 2 lanes wide making for lots of fun squeeze-play accidents to tie up your commute. Ditto the ramp leading to southbound Kennedy from eastbound 80.
:: looks at it on Google Maps ::
Yikes. Crossing onramps, with the straight-line direction on Route 4 leading to onramps to the other road, and the through road having to cross other ramps at grade…
I’ll nominate the “Spaghetti Bowl” interchange in Las Vegas where the I-15 and US-95 come together.
I would also like to nominate a couple in the LA area I have had the privilege to drive through:
On the 10 West when you have to make the interchange to stay on the 10W to get to the 110S to San Pedro. It seems that it is right where the 101, the 5 and the 10 all come together. I have never managed to make the right “exit”. Now going on the 110N to make the 10E interchange heading back is really simple and easy, that confuses me why it is so hard coming one way, but no the other.
The other is taking the 10W to the 710 to Long Beach, the lane you need to be in turns into a VERY SHARP TURN with no signs pointing this out. :eek:
Some may be left, but they’ve removed most of them. There are two missing from route 1 between New Brunswick and Princeton. And the one on Route 35 is gone.
57 posts and no one has mentioned Atlanta’s finest, Spaghetti Junction! Something of a double decker cloverleaf where I-85 and I-285 twist in a tangle! Continue west around the Perimeter to the clusterfark at GA400 and I-285 and on to the horror that is I-285 and I-75 where the poo really hits the fan. What fun!
After nominating the entire city of Boston, I’ll add Denver’s own “mousetrap” interchange, where I-70 and I-25 meet. It’s actually pretty functional if you just follow the signage but the designer never met a flyover he didn’t like.
Meh. The Mousetrap now is a tremendous improvement over what it used to be. When I lived in Denver, we had a truck tip over in the Mousetrap that was carrying torpedoes.
I waded in here to mention the intersection in Pennsylvania of I-70 and, well, I-70. I guess I-76 is involved as well, but the point is that to stay on I-70, one has to drive several blocks on US30 in Breezewood.
So this may not be the worst-designed intersection, just the one most apparently a result of corruption.
