Currently, I will not drive west on I70 from Denver area. I’m in a 4Runner, so a pretty hardy vehicle. But it’s insane.
I’ve been a mountain driver since 1976. Everything, you name it, anywhere. But I70 is asking for death right now.
Based on your description, it should have instead said, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
Only sign I’ve ever seen on a jeep trail -
'Dry brakes out before descent. ’ It was right after a river crossing.
Someone upthread mentioned a street that just ends in a parking lot. We have a similar street around here. It’s a N/S street where driving north just dumps you into the south end of a parking lot for a large building (originally a Wal-Mart, then a Sears) that has been divided up into half a dozen businesses. If you stay left and drive behind the building, you can connect to the next E/W street, but the N/S street is not designed as a thru street. If you keep right, there are two E/W aisles of the parking lot that you expect will take you to the larger parking lot in front, but the first right actually dead-ends in a weird parking lot cul-de-sac, so you have to remember to go to the second E/W aisle if you want to get through. The whole design is a real mess.
never mind
Having worked for the highway department in question AND knowing the area, I’m going to hazard a guess that the cost/benefit analysis at the time the interchange was constructed, traffic counts indicated that very few motorists would be making the EB152-NB99 movement and the cost of adding a connector would not be justified. I suspect the vast majority of people who live in the area that would be affected already went from EB152 to NB59 into Merced and thence onto NB99, OR NB233 into Chowchilla OR Robertson Blvd to Avenue 24 (Madera County has no imagination for county road names). ISTR that SR152 originally intersected with SR99 at grade and SR99 was not a limited access highway (ie freeway) for a very long time. The interchange was built to bring SR99 up from conventional highway to limited access, and data probably showed few if anybody turned left from SR152 to SR99. A slightly deeper analysis would have probably concluded that was because most motorists avoided the intersection because making that left turn is a very unsafe move, and instead opted for a safer alternative (eg Merced or Chowchilla).
What agency prevents you from gating your road? Who puts up the barricades? IANAL, but if I were you, I’d be tempted to post signs where the public road enters your property that clearly states “Private Property - Permission to pass revokable at any time”. See how long it lasts. After a few months, block the road and wait for a response. Document the closure. What this attempts to do is to defeat any prescriptive right anybody may claim over the road. You may have to sue whatever agency attempts to assert control over the road to reclaim it.
Yeah, and I’m guessing the presence of the railroad track that parallels 99, and the fact that NB99 dips down to pass under the tracks just north of there, probably complicates the design of a flyover type ramp. And yes, zooming out, it becomes evident that for most people originating from points west, taking 152 all the way to 99 and then going north is actually kind of a circuitous route. It makes more sense to take one of those other highways north and then get on 99. The only people who might need to get on 99 north for whom that wouldn’t work would be a few local farmers, and they likely all know that they need to go up to Ave. 24 to get on 99.
Another slight quirk in that area is that NB99 passes under the railroad tracks, but SB99 passes over them. The underpass was actually built circa 1930 when 99 was first constructed as a two lane highway. When it was upgraded to four lanes in the late 1950s they kept the old underpass for NB traffic, and built a new overpass for SB traffic. That was how I actually first noticed that interchange – YouTube recommended a video about how 99 was still using this 95 year old underpass just north of there.
Hessler Ct. here in Cleveland, OH. The last wooden block street left in the city, and one of the few remaining anywhere. I believe there are only 4 or 5 left in the entire US.
Driving between temples in Cambodia the rural road was quite rough and occasionally would dip deeply into old bomb craters. That was unusual.
Great road! Driven/ridden it lots of times.
Route 211 in Humboldt County, around ‘The Lost Coast’ (California) has sections like that also, but I swear the road is only a lane and a half wide in places. Huge potholes, scary shit!
Not that far from me is a street which serves no purpose other than to connect two strip malls with a busy state route. The street is named “Crossroads Center Way”.
(Googles)
Ah, I thought that looked like it’d be University Circle. I’ll have to check that out the next time I’m in the area.
That reminds me, east of here there’s an interchange that exists solely to connect a tribal casino with US-50. IIRC it got built as part of a deal to balance the state budget back when CA required a 2/3 majority to pass a budget. The state gets a cut of the revenue from the casino in exchange for building the interchange, I believe.
No, the State of California does not get any share of the casino’s revenue. The casino did, however, pay for the interchange AND quite a lot of improvements that the state would otherwise not have had the money to pay for at the time. I actually had a little oversight of that job.
On the highway that goes alongside the Ohio River going south from East Liverpool goes through a power plant.
In Zimbabwe, in the east, there is this meandering dirt road that goes through the mountains, extremely rural, and ends close to a very dilapidated general good store.
It is also at the border with Mozambique.
So for reasons, mostly related to marijuana and subsequent navigational issues, we found a border crossing that can only be crossed by foot, through thigh deep water - but on the Mozambique side, there was a shop. It sold beer. So we illegally crossed, as you do, as a teenager.
Aside from refreshing beer, we met a guy who also smoked weed, the thing that most impressed me was that he had a flint and a young impala’s horn full of fluff for tinder - he used this to light the joint. Then just stashed the horn in his pocket…
In Maryland, US-1 runs along the top of a hydroelectric dam. It gets quite narrow where it passes the actual power plant. I guess putting a road on top of a dam isn’t that unusual of an arrangement; in NorCal there used to be a road across Folsom Dam, but that one was closed after 9/11 and eventually replaced by a bridge downstream from the dam (so I never got to drive on that one). But usually a dam road is a local road or small rural road, not a major highway.
That happened to my wife and her girlfriend many years ago. They were driving along a back road in England and realized they had missed their turn onto another road. Her friend found a wide spot and turned around. In all the confusion, she forgot to remain on the proper side of the road and had a head-on collision with another vehicle. My wife suffered a broken collar bone.
We left Alaska in 2009, driving our 27’ RV down the Alcan Highway, which is not a big deal. We planned to stop in Joseph, OR along our route to visit a first cousin I’d never met. Our route took us to Lewiston, ID, which I’m familiar with, but I’d forgotten about the very steep downgrade to get there. It’s been redone, but large, heavy vehicles are not ideal for that sort of terrain. And we were towing a car, as well.
Even in low gear, the brakes were overheating on the way down, and we breathed a sigh of relief upon getting to the RV park. However, that wasn’t the worst part. I called my cousin and told him we’d be coming from Lewiston the next day and he said with surprise: “Over the Rattlesnake?” Ummm. . .huh? It lived up to its name. Twisty, turny grades with no shoulder or guard rails, and long drop-offs to certain death in a motorhome isn’t fun.