Heading south today from Michigan, off and on rain and storms. Got just past Dayton on 75, and traffic came to a pretty abrupt stop. A trucker said he heard a power line fell across the expressway, plus a fatal accident. Telling us could be 5 hours of sitting here, so people are now starting to turn around and go northbound on the shoulder.
Ay-yi-yi. Bet this ends up on the news tonight
You’re already on the news:
If I am ever on a long trip with more than one person with me, I’m ensure that whoever isn’t driving regularly checks for traffic jams up ahead. Alone I always do so as a matter of course at each stop; it has saved me a lot of time and hassle, plus I often get some nice non-interstate scenery out of the deal.
Yeah, wow. So we just went back up the southbound lanes to the first exit (Middletown) on the far left. Quite a heck of a mess. The poor semis just have to sit there I guess cuz they sure as shit ain’t making that turn-around.
We were hoping to make it to Lexington tonight. I guess on the plus side, if we had left as little earlier, and we made it past this mess before it happened, we’d have hit a tornado situation in Florence/Erlanger. The radio guy was telling everyone on 75 in Northern Kentucky to get the hell off the road.
ETA: sat there for about an hour twenty, with another half hour driving back up the shoulder. Just got a room in Middletown and the hotel is full of power line trucks from around the tri-state area probably anticipating a electrical mess from the storms that went through
Wow! Some furious episodes of raining here in W
Mich today.
At least there’s not a gruesome accident scene to clean up. Traffic on I75 should be flowing again shortly. Well once the horrendous backups clear out 
Now don’t you wish we had those flying cars they promised us back in the 60s. I’ll never get over that.
You want to fly in tornado weather?
Saves on gas, just let the tornado provide the lift.
I would’ve settled for one of those car periscopes. Or a Star Trek style transporter.
You can just fly around bad weather. Planes do that every day.
That’s what we always said to each other:
Bob: You see that shit weather out there sorta to the left?
Sam: Yeah.
Bob: Don’t go there.
Sam: OK.
Are you sure you want one of those?
Related to the thread on navigational devices: Google Maps has told me, in real time, of upcoming construction delays and road closures ahead due to accidents. I once had to navigate through city streets, but I averted a major traffic tie-up on I-5 in northern California. Google warned me about this a good 100 miles earlier.
I’ve had it do that too me, too. That’s about 2hrs of driving (alright, 1½ hrs if I’m wearing my leaded shoes 
). The vast majority of accidents will be well cleared & gone, including the backup, before I ever get there. Unless it’s being investigated as a fatal or police-involved (which Google has no way of knowing), I’d expect it to be cleared & therefore, consciously continue on my original way.
How do you check for traffic jams?
My GPS warns me and suggests alternative routes.
Google Maps has a traffic overlay in the stacked map details icon, green for clear, red for stopped, orange for slower than the limit.
Well, in the situation I described above, I kept checking Google as I neared the accident scene. I took the exit Google suggested, drove through the city, and passed under I-5 where I could observe stopped traffic. About 10 minutes later I re-entered the freeway and continued on my merry way…with a hellvua lot less traffic!
The accidents that are real disasters pretty quickly develop multiple miles of stopped = black traffic on Google. Those are the scenarios you might want to divert 50 miles early if the accident is out in ruralia where alternate routes are few.
For the typical urban / suburban accident with a 2 mile red back-up behind it, those seem to have a half-life of about 30 minutes. And unless you know when it happened, that half-life is already in progress when you refresh the map and first see it.
etc.
Yeah - we always take advantage of having a copilot! One time I got stuck in stop-and-go traffic when driving solo; I don’t know if I’d have spotted it at a previous rest, but it had been an hour or more since then, so who knows…
We were once stuck on I-95 south of Fayetteville, NC. Worst stoppage ever - cars were not moving AT ALL. People turned off their cars, and were going off into the woods to pee. Only an hour or so, luckily.
Whatever caused it had been completely cleared up by the time traffic was moving again - no wrinkled cars or debris by the roadside.
On another occasion, I was on US 15 in southern PA, going northbound. I knew it was bad when the SECOND medivac helicopter landed. The state police actually came and blocked traffic off at the previous exit, and had cars in my section turn around and drive south on the northbound lanes, to exit there.