Over the New Year I had the misfortune of having to drive on the 401 through the northern Toronto suburbs. For those of you who haven’t had this “pleasure,” it’s a bit like playing Pole Position on a freeway that is often more construction site than road surface, only with 200,000 other drivers all driving faster than you and passing you on both sides. Not for nothing did David Cronenberg set the film Crash there.
I was starting to think that the 401 might even be worse than the stretch of Interstate 405 between Lawndale and the Valley (Los Angeles, of course) which I also had the misfortune of driving every week. It also had its fill of speeding, reckless idiot drivers, and also featured, at a spot just north of LAX, a traffic jam that appeared every freaking time. I tend to think, though, that the 401 gets the nod because of its more frequent bad weather, which does nothing to slow down the daredevil jerks who are flying past you.
It scares me to think there might be a worse stretch of freeway in North America. Is there?
Oh yes. I’ve had the pleasure of traversing both LA and most of the major metropolitan freeways on the east coast. While the 405 certainly ranks in the top five, there are worse. I-95 up north through Maryland between DC and Delaware is consistently jammed. Every single time when I try to go up to NYC it is the stretch that takes the longest, just because of traffic. Once you clear it, it is clear sailing for the most part until you get really close to NYC.
But, the worst, by far…the Cross-Bronx. Oh. My. God. My first time driving it was moving stuff down from NY to DC. I’m in a giant Ryder truck. Going through the Cross-Bronx. Rush hour. I seriously thought I was going to die. There is no shoulder to speak of, so if someone gets in trouble, then the entire thing gets shut down. And the condition of the road is horrible. And everyone is insane.
I defy someone to find me a worse highway than that in the US or Canada.
A tip if you ever have to suffer the 401 in Toronto again: get thee to the express lanes. The traffic still sucks, but at least you don’t have to change lanes every three freaking seconds just to avoid getting sucked into an off-ramp.
The worst freeway I’ve ever driven on myself, however, is Interstate 44 in Oklahoma City, before it becomes the Turner Turnpike. When I moved from California to New Jersey, that was the worst stretch of road on the whole trip. The traffic wasn’t bad, but the road surface was awful; it seemed like the truck was going to shake itself apart.
(The turnpike, on the other hand, was the best highway on the entire trip. Odd, that.)
On preview, my story doesn’t beat Neurotik’s, but it does reinforce my conviction to never drive in New York City, ever.
Duke: Welcome to my nightmare and that of many other Torontonians. The 401 is very well known as the Highway from Hell.
<hijack>
Did it happen to be snowing when you were here? Because we always try to have it snow for out-of-towners on the 401, just to add to their driving pleasure. Did you come through Niagara Falls on the way? If so, how did you like the QEW? Wasn’t that special?
Next time, try taking our shiny new Electronic Toll Route, the 407! You’ll have it all to yourself because everyone hates taking it and getting their f*cked-up, impossible-to-resolve 407 bills in the mail. If you’re towing a trailer, they’ll ding you for that too. And they will hound you even unto your doorstep in the States until you pay their bill and their usurious interest charges. <hijack>
I would like to nominate both Portland and Seattle as being in the top 10 worst roads.
In both cases, Interstate 5 goes down to a whopping 2 lanes in downtown. Throw into that bridges, and unexpected traffic flows it all adds up to really bad traffic.
compared to these hell holes coming back to LA traffic is gift
In my rather limited personal experience, good old Route 2 in Massachusetts is horrible during certain times of day. I’m not even talking about in towards Boston, I’m talking about out in central MA where the on-ramps are so old that many of them have STOP signs! Merging from a dead stop into 65 mph traffic is hair-raising, to say the least.
Don’t even get me started on the highways that are actually in Boston shudder.
Various trucker organizations tend to rate Pennsylvania’s highways as the worst. Not having been there in a number of years, nor having had the misfortune to suffer the particular Canadian highway you traversed, I can’t say which is worse.
I-70 across Missouri can boast awful road surface (though about half of it has been redone recently), lots of big trucks, and one of the highest (maybe the highest) fatality rates in the interstate highway system.
I’m another one who would vote for the 405 as being the worst–espcially the stretch from LAX to the 101 (the Valley). I’ve had more than my share of wasting my life on that road.
AND they just raised the rates. As of 1 Feb 2003 for a normal car, a minimum of 12.10 cents per kilometre. Ack. I don’t even have a car and this pisses me off. And…
As of 1 Feb, the Non-Transponder Charge will be $3.30 per trip.
If you have a transponder, you are billed $1/month for a lease on the transponder.
There’s a $1/month ‘account fee’, presumably for the privelege of letting them suck money from your account.
If there’s no transponder and it can’t read the license plate, there’s an additional $50 charge. (Don’t know how they figure out who to bill that one to though…)
And, oh yes. These fees are taxable.
And if you don’t pay, they won’t let you renew your (Ontarian) license plates.
The 407’s website is maddeningly imprecise in its information. It doesn’t, for example, say what reciprocal billing agreements have been made with which out-of-province agencies, or what kinds of transponders will work under those agreements, but blandly insists that ‘all out-of-province users will be billed’.
So… are they they trading info with the New York authorities? Almost certainly. Texas? Probably. Guanajuato? Maybe. Germany? Who knows? And I’ve seen at least one vehicle in the GTA with plates from each of those jurisdictions.
I-10 has to be the worst Interstate I’ve ever had the misfortune of driving. Try taking a trip from New Orleans to Houston sometime and you’ll see what I mean. Especially bad is the westbound, right-hand lane of I-10 once you get into Texas. There is a halfassed smoothed over bump literally every few feet for several miles. I wonder what the hell happend to that road.
Ah, the 401. I live in Hamilton for school, but my family lives on the other side of Montreal, so I have the joy of driving that wretched highway on a regular basis. In fact, I just did so today, since my Christmas break is over :(. Lucky for us, it was clear the whole way, but there have been times when it was SO HORRIBLE! Though I’m probably one of those insane drivers the OP was talking about…I figure I can get away with it because I’m a female from Quebec :D.
Also, though, highway 10 in Quebec, at the access point to Jaques-Cartier bridge has got to be among the worst sections of road ever. There are billions of people trying to get on and off the island of Montreal, and it seems that the bloody bridge and its access points have been under construction since the day the officially opened it! It once took us nearly 2 hours to cross that bridge (traffic stopped at the Atwater exit, but then never moved again) to get off the island, and this was at 2 in the morning! Imagine what its like at rush hour! If you work on the island, LIVE ON THE ISLAND. You’ll drive yourself into a slow, painful death over the St. Lawrence otherwise.
My SO just mentionned another one…highway 55 between Sherbrooke and Drummondville (PQ). This was originally a logging road, so it’s one lane in each direction, and the lanes are narrow and they twist through the northen end of the Appalachians into the Mauricie region of the province. This narrow road IS a highway, though, and so the speed limit is 100km/h. It is generally considered to be (at least in the immediate area) to be one of the deadliest roads in Quebec. The government is spending a lot of money to double it into a proper highway, but that wont be completed for a while.
I totally agree with this. I recently drove from Blue Springs to St. Louis via I-70 and it seems that every mile or so, there was a makeshift memorial white cross and/or bunch of flowers on the side of the road. They (family/friends) do this to commemorate someone who died at that particular spot. It was kind of spooky.
(flame disclaimer: despite what I’m about to say, this is still one of my favourite freeways in the country)
CT15…the Merritt Parkway in Fairfield county, Connecticut. Having the edge of the outermost lane 2 inches from rock sides of hills and bridges that seem to almost cut off the top of a regular car (although the architecture is beautiful) makes it feel like one of the deadliest roads…it’s a real thrill to drive. If you break down on that freeway, you are SCREWED because on 90% of it, there is NO breakdown lane, or even enough space to squeeze your car off the road. Oh…and the scikorvsky bridge has got to be the slippiest bridge in North America
Letterman makes jokes about how dangerous that freeway is all the time (his home is off one of the exits on it)
I traveled the Pennsylvania Turnpike years ago and it was horrible. Divided highway with at least two lines each way. Unfortunately for most of the trip half of the road was shut down for repairs. So you would have a two lane road on the easbound side for a while and then on the westbound side. The only things sure to be working were the toll booths.
I will say that Interstate 5 through the San Joaquin Valley in California has got to be the dullest road I have ever driven. There is a slight curve near the Kings County line for excitement and there is a huge cattle feed lot near the turn off to San Luis dam that puts out enough ammonia to bring tears to your eyes. A factory responsible for such pollution would be shut down overnight.
Another vote for the 405. I fancy myself a fairly experienced freeway driver (having grown up in L.A.) but that one stretch of the 405 scares the heebie-jeebies out of me.
Oh my word, tell me about it. The 99 going up through Central California is mind-numbing too, (all those miles and miles of oleander in the center divider!). I always bring lots of tapes or CDs along to help me stay awake. And I drink lots of TaB (miracle diet cola which wakes me from the dead).
And then there was the time the Bill Davis’ bridge over the 401 melted due to the tanker crash.
At that time I was living off the 427, working days in Darlington/Bowmanville to the east of Toronto, and going to school in Kitchener/Waterloo in the evenings and weekends to the west of Toronto. Before the fire, it was home to work 1 hour (some trafffic), work to school 3 hours(heavy traffic), school to home 1.5 hours (no traffic).
Then the overpass melted, and I had to bypass. The quickest route was by way of Orangeville, and added 1.5 hours to the work to school commute, bringing it to 4.5 hours, which forced me to leave work early and arrive at class late for most of a term.
The thing that was most annoying was that at that time the overpass that melted was no more than a monument to a retired premier. It only connected a couple of dirt roads in cow country, and there was a perfectly good overpass just a few kilometers down the way.
A curse on the 401. Now I live where there are no freeways and my daily commute is 5 to 10 minutes. I’m much happier.
