I nominate the tiny town of Trion, Georgia, whose city fathers proudly placed their sewage treatment facility right beside the main road, just at the edge of what passes for a downtown. When they crank up the aerators (and literally start stirring up some shit), the resulting smell could induce aneurisms.
Well, the street signs all along the road we were on (which was the road I described; single-lane along its length except for a brief bit past the car dealerships) read “Atlantic City Expsswy”. Also, our hotel was maybe a mile from the casino (it was the Quality Inn on N. Albany), and when we asked for directions to the turnpike, the clerk got us on it via an entrance maybe 5-10 miles out from the hotel. The highway we got on via that entrance looked a lot like the road you describe as the ACE, but I’m pretty sure the sign for the ramp said “New Jersey Turnpike” (and, after all, that was what we asked the hotel clerk to direct us to). Even if I’m wrong about that, though, I’m absolutely positive that the road we used to enter AC was the expressway. Unless, of course, they mislabeled the entirety of the length of the road, which, given the rest of the signage we encountered in NJ, wouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.
Corsicana, TX without a doubt.
Corsicana’s about 50-75 miles south of Dallas on I-45. For some reason or another, there has been one construction project or another slowing and screwing up all traffic through Corsicana for the past 9 FUCKING YEARS! It really sucks to get all the way from Houston to Corsicana in something like 3 hours, then sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic for an hour and a half while you have to pee. And this has been the case for almost the past decade! Unbelievable.
Honorable mention has to go to that shithole called Waller, TX. This turd of a town used to be on US 290/TX 6 between Houston and Hempstead on the way to Austin or College Station. Waller had no less than 4 stoplights along a highway frontage of maybe a mile and a half. Combine that with really low speed limits, and you have ready-made frustration. That, and the damn town didn’t have a decent restaraunt, convenience store or gas station!
Luckily, they built the 290 bypass around the fucking place and I’m hoping it’s withering away to nothing now.
If you ever go down 69 between Greenville and Mineola, and you manage to make it through Lone Oak, you’ll go through Point, which is exactly like Waller.
Rancho Mirage, home of the half-blind Rolls’ driving idiots who favor going 15 MPH in the fast lane, braking for no apparent reason and making sudden unexplained lane changes. No doubt they all have stock tickers installed in the car and are just content to be making a jillion dollars an hour on their investments.
I know it’s a city, but I have to mention Tijuana - just plain scary, and the thought of being pulled over and sent to jail on trumped up charges makes me grip the steering wheel until it’s bald. The only real reason to drive through there is to head farther south, otherwise just take the bus into town and get dropped off on
Avenida Revolucion.
Any city south or west of, but attached to, Salt Lake City. Idiot drivers, bad weather, no left turn arrows at big intersections. The record was seeing 5 accidents (all on surface streets) in one day.
Reform Alabama. It has a four lane highway which has a 45 mph speed limit, and two traffic lights which for some reason you have to stop at every single time you drive through town.
Bird Island, Danube, and Olivia on Hwy 212 in Central Minnesota. They are all about three miles away from each other, and you barely have enough time to make it up to 55 before you have to slow down to 15 or 25 or whatever the silly rural speed limit is. Oh, yeah…sometimes, you get really lucky and get stuck behind a combine that takes up half the lane, and since there’s oncoming traffic, you stay where you are, moving only slightly faster than the Mendenhall Glacier.
Well, Ithaca still has a nasty convergence of highways in the west portion of the city. If I’m not mistaken, the center of that link (where is says “13”), is where, if you are travelling west through the city, you need to take an unexpected right hand turn onto a one-way street, which you then need to get into the far left hand lane of, since that’s the only turn lane for the highways west out of town. And this is in the middle of a well-travelled commercial area.
Of course, I was last there 5 yrs ago myself, but the maps still shows a huge cluster of roads (yeah, Ithaca is Gorges, since water flows downhill, but roads also run downhill too, apparently.)
Ludovic, I live right in the area
How the heck did that happen? What I meant to say was:
Ludovic, I live right in the area shown on your map of Ithaca, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Granted, it’s not perfect, it could be better, but it was previously much, much worse.
If you’re trying to drive through Ithaca, there are still several turning decisions that have to be made fairly quickly, which is understandable since coming from the east, there are 5 possible routes to choose from in the span of…well, I can’t even figure out the map to see where they begin and end, a bad sign in itself. This is compounded by the quick turn you need in order to remain westbound, which again, I’m not sure still exists.
But I suppose they do as good as possible for a large town/small city with at least 8 distinct roads out of town.