This was my first thought. I went to UCSC, and when I was a senior in high school visiting the campus, my mom and I witnessed a terrible accident driving home. The driver was distracted by a passenger, and almost hit the center barrier. He grabbed the wheel, and pulled sharply, overcorrecting. They drove up the side of the mountain, and rolled back down. Mom and I were just behind them and had too much momentum to stop, so we dashed by just in time. The whole stretch of highway is just terrible, and is always getting flooded and rained out.
Don’t forget, North America is more than the US and Canada. There are some roads in Mexico that really take the cake. I remember driving from Chichen Itza to Cancun several years ago, and it was…unbelievable. The heat and humidity make the sky seem close and oppressive. With no stars, no moon, and no streetlights, I have never seen a darker night. My dad was driving, and later confessed that he was pretty sure that we would be in an accident at some point. The highway between Cancun and Tulum is pretty heinous too - I saw a couple Mac trucks on their side next to the road. This may have something to do with the Mexican style of driving, of course.
My favourite thing about MA2 is that in Leominster, where one of my friends lives, there’s a regular side road that connects to the freeway. It isn’t a stop sign, it isn’t an exit ramp, just a 90 degree turn off the highway…and it’s the most direct way to get to his house. He tells me that it’s left over from before MA2 was a freeway and that road used to cross it in an intersection. I’m sure it freaks out anybody driving behind me whenever I make a right hand turn off the freeway into nowhere.
I believe the poster quoted is referring to the Schuylkill (Surekill) expressway, not the Turnpike. And yeah, that’s the worst road in my area, with I-95 Philly-Delaware a close second. Oh, and US 30 where it loops around Lancaster is pretty horrendous as well. Seems like it’s been under construction since the Reformation.
And when I lived in the western part of the state, the Pittsburgh Parkway (how true) would regularly reduce me to the brink of suicide.
I’ve driven the PA Turnpike between the Morgantown and Bedford interchanges about once very two weeks for the past four years, and aside from being bored out of my skull, have not noticed the problems mentioned by other posters. In particular, the on and off-ramps are longer, not shorter, than many more recent highways.
Outside Pennsylvania, my most current nomination is I-10 heading west from Houston. Jammed to a crawl 16 hours out of 24, any day of the week.
In terms of road quality, Michigan has to rank at the bottom. The reason is that Michigan doesn’t enforce its weight limits on semis, so the roads take much more abuse than they’re supposed to.
Until recently, I-94 through Detroit was the bumpiest, most pothole-ridden freeway you’d ever seen. I’ve come to the conclusion that it was built by French fur traders in 1712 and wasn’t touched by a maintenance crew until the year 2000, when the state finally got its ass around to reconstructing the thing. It’s nice now, but given the hyper-overloaded trucks that rumble over it, I wonder how long it’ll stay that way.
I live within two miles of the second and third worst intersections in the US: the intersection of Grant Ave. and US 1(Roosevelt Blvd.), and about a mile north, the intersection of Red Lion Rd. and US 1. http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/06/27/dangerous.intersections/
Every few years, a major roadway usually undergoes lengthy repairs, the most notorious being the tire fire that damaged sections of I-95 about six years ago.
Plus, I get to learn how to drive here. Aren’t I lucky.
Ugh, mind-numbingly dull. I used to drive that stretch quite often, accompanied by a crummy AM-only radio. More than once I was slapping my face to stay awake (this was during the day after a good night’s sleep, too).
Lot of Canadians here. Anyone have an opinion on the Décarie Expressway? It looks frightening.
Of course, there’s always the Transcanadienne in northern Montreal; a few winters ago, they had a little problem where the snowploughs were building the snow into nice little ramps so that if you skidded on the black ice, you would just zoom up the slope and over the side, where you would fall several metres and crash to the ground below. Fun fun. A couple of people got killed.
I believe that was the James Snow Parkway overpass that melted. Snow was Minister of Transportation during Bill Davis’s government.
And at the time it was a pretty rarely used road - but it’s fairly well used now. They plan this stuff in advance.
Matt, I think the reasons we’re seeing a lot of Canadians on here is
Winter is very hard on roads. Ice freezing in asphalt causes it to crack and buckle. Especially along the St. Lawrence lowlands (the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal route) the roads are built on a lot of limestone, which apparently sucks to build roads on. It’s very har to keep a highway in decent shape in a harsh winter; you don’t get that in, say, Louisiana.
Unlike the United States, Canadian highways are entirely funded by the provinces. In the States, Interstates are heavily subsidized by the federal government, and when the money flows out from Washington the states can’t wait to get the crews working. Canadian provinces have to handle this on their own and so tend to be a little tight fisted with the bucks. This varies from government to government - during the Rae administration the condition of the 401 was getting ridiculously bad, and it’s actually better now than it was then. There was REALLY substantial improvement from '95 to about '99.
Ontario in particular has the HIGHEST truck weight restrictions per axle of any jurisdiction north of the Rio Grande, by a wide margin in many cases, and allows lift axles (those wheels you see that can be lifted off the ground) which are invariably lifted up when the cops aren’t around, putting more weight on the other axles. So we have very heavy trucks tearing up the roads all along the 401, and a lot of them go into Quebec. Quebec’s weight laws are just a hair tighter than Ontario’s.
Belt Parkway in New York City. the only time you can actually drive (as opposed to crawl) on it is about 4 am. FDR is just as bad
the one going to toronoto where everybody is speeding is actually my favourite. when i was on it i thought it was time a get a car with bigger engine but then i came back to new york and spent half of the day making just a few miles on FDR and then Belt, so that concern disappeared
The 405 in Los Angeles doen’t even make the top 20. All that’s bad about it is that it is crowded. It is well marked, wide, and relatively flat and straight, with a decent road surface the entire length. Carpool lanes all the way from LAX to Orange County (and a new one over Mullholland Pass). The weather is almost never an issue. Yea, it can be a parking lot often times, but that’s par for the course for many freeways in the urban areas of this country (Atlanta, San Francisco, Seattle, New York/Connecticut/New Jersey, Washington D.C.)
Now the 5 freeway through downtown Los Angeles, that is a POS. Horrible road surface, due to a ceaseless barrage of massive semi-trucks. Bizarre interchanges requiring constant vigilance. Random, sharp turns. Horrendous traffic. Hot, smoggy weather. Yeechh.
I’ve driven the Toronto roads mentioned (401 and the Gardiner) and I-5 (in CA, Portland and Tacoma/Seattle) on the west coast dozens of times. You guys have no idea how good you’ve got it. The Belt Parkway is sooo bad. I try to avoid it all costs. Coming from NJ, if I want to pick up somebody from JFK, it pretty much takes all day. I have to leave at least 2 hours before the flight is scheduled to arrive. We’re talking a MINIMUM of 4 hours of driving for a 50 mile round trip, EVERY SINGLE TIME!
OH! Scary road! Okay, not entirely the road’s fault, but Mnementh, LaurAnge and I drove to New York on the I87. In a blizzard. WITH NO DAMN LAMPPOSTS!! Pitch black except for the brights reflecting off snow, crawling at 20 MPH to avoid hitting anything until poor Mnem was about dead from fatigue and stress. My god, we don’t realize how good we have it up here some times. At least our autoroutes have lights comme du monde.
