I’ll second Boston.
I’ll add I-80 through Pennsylvania. Most boring stretch of highway east of the Mississippi. How boring is it? There’s so little there that the mileage signs on I-80 near Cleveland give mileage to New York City rather than to any point closer. And not particularly scenic, just generic forest wilderness.
I don’t mind long-straight roads in the Midwest or Southwest. They are tedious but not stressful and can be fine as long as you get into the right zone of mind.
I will have to 4th or 999999999th Boston. I live in the general area, have lived in Boston proper and can drive in it just fine if I have to but it isn’t pleasant and I avoid it as much as possible just because I have enough stress in my life. The streets are endlessly confusing because they don’t follow straight lines at all, the drivers are unusually aggressive, signage is incredibly poor and provincial at best, parking can be horrendously expensive to nearly impossible and there are bizarre traffic laws that don’t apply anywhere else in the country (driving in breakdown lanes is allowed on some roads during some time of the day so watch your right side when you take an exit because you may hit someone sailing past you at 80+MPH; someone actually thought it was a good idea to build left-turn lanes in some areas with no visible green arrow at all). Even a GPS will not help you on many routes. The Big Dig made a lot of navigation 3-D and very lane sensitive so the old adage “If you don’t know exactly where you are going in Boston, you probably shouldn’t be driving here in the first place” isn’t mitigated much by technology.
I have had too many friends and family members that claimed they could drive themselves to my house just fine from the airport only to show up way late and visibly shell-shocked (some shaking and in tears) to let people try that on their own. Driving in Manhattan is in mere child’s play in comparison. You have to go to Rome or Istanbul to approximate the driving situation in Boston.
I am going to kind of disagree. One year, we crossed Indiana and Ohio on I-90/80, the next year we cut from Chicago down to Indianapolis and took I-70; the 90/80 toll road was utter crap, beaten to hell, not interesting in any way, with sucky traffic, and we had to pay for that privilege. 70 was not more interesting, but it was butter-smooth, Columbus was the only part where traffic was bad, and it was a freeway. So appreciate I-70 fwiw, at least it is not the I-90/80 nightmare.
I’ll just add that every other street seems to be named Boyleston. I once found myself at the corner of Boyleston and Boyleston.
I-40 from Little Rock to Memphis.
The PA Turnpike is no treat anywhere along its length, but the stretch between New Stanton and Breezewood is one continuous, crowded, life threatening PITA, especially in the rain.
There’s a stretch of I-78 between Allentown and Hamburg PA that seems to be shut down on a weekly basis due to an accident, often fatal. Its a four lane very hilly narrow cattle shoot with almost no shoulders and popular with truckers. If your worst nightmare is being boxed in by 3 asshole truck drivers and being forced to drive 80mph because one of them is right up on your ass in the hammer lane, you can easily get to live it along this stretch of highway hell.
I’ve driven I-80 from California to Nebraska, I-40 from Memphis to California, and I-5 the length of California more times than I can count. All are more or less desolate…though I-5 is better described a ‘boring’, because it’s got nothing on eastern Wyoming in ‘middle of nowhere’ terms…but I don’t mind long lonely stretches of road. What I hate are (relatively) short, crowded stretches of road that take freaking forever to make any progress through.
With this in mind, I nominate I-5 through the Greater Los Angeles Basin as being the worst drive in the country.
The state of Michigan. Period.
ETA: I should probably mention, this is due to horrible road conditions, not traffic congestion.
It used to be highway 50 thru southern Missouri was a hellway of slow moving farm trucks and tractors who will NOT get out of your way and the second you pass one, theirs another.
You failed to mention (at least back in the 70’s) that many of the two-way streets downtown were insanely narrow and the almost random pattern of one-way streets was also equally baffling and challenging. My wife, who was a very good driver, was reduced to tears the first time she ever had to drive in Boston. Never got over that incident as she refused to drive into the city after that (we lived in Framingham at the time). And speaking of Framingham, the drive down Route 9 was just a disaster waiting to happen.
Fully agree. If you don’t know Boston, don’t have a GPS or map, you are effed. Totally effed.
Dude, this is one of the most beautiful drives in the country! Bright turquoise water, white sandy small islands, what’s not to love? But okay, if you don’t like bridges then yeah, I can see that.
I-5, yeah I agree with the O.P. At least Hwy 101 is an enjoyable alternative.
Hwy 99 is another alternative to I-5 but that’s an ugly, terrible drive too. At least on I-5 you can fly pretty fast and get it over with fairly quickly. 99 sucks.
Trust me, people like me who grew up here are just as confused. I’ll be driving along the expressway into Boston when the exit for the tunnel pops up and I’ll momentarily be like, “Wait, what tunnel? Where’s the exit to South Station by Chinatown?” Then, “Oh, that’s right, there’s a tunnel.”
On the flip side, I cannot understand streets laid out on a grid. I was in FL visiting relatives many years ago and their explaining to me how easy it is to get around by naming streets SW 14 and NE 11 and such. It still confounds me because I’m so used to having go around the mulberry bush to get from Point A to Point B. I’d probably have a nervous breakdown if I ever had to do a straight shot like I-40, LOL.
My husband doesn’t mind long stretches of desolate highway. Then again he lived in the Midwest for a time before we married.
Where? There’s no “Los Cruces” road anywhere. And there’s no Las Cruces road near the border. The closest Las Cruces Road is in Yuma, but it isn’t close to the border, it’s in town. The second closest road by that name is in Sierra Vista, about 10 miles.
Plus there’s a fence. Or a river. Kinda hard to accidentally cross. Unless you’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s a fence. (you know Arizona, the state that famously guards the border with a fervor.) And if you’re in the middle of nowhere, you’re a long way from the interstate. Which is north of the border. If your GPS can’t tell north from south, it isn’t really a very good GPS.
The closest the Interstate comes to the border is about 20 miles, except in Yuma and Nogales, and both have regulated border crossings. Where were you, and where were you trying to go?
Moral of the story: don’t try to pass off BS to people that live there.
I don’t mind long, straight highways with no scenery. But I HATE tedious drives. Case in point: I95 between Philly and D.C. Never, ever drive from Philly to Tyson’s Corner in Virginia during commute hours on a Friday night (ask me how I know). With no traffic, that’s a 2-hour drive. If you make the mistake I did (once), you’ll actually drive through three metro areas (Philly, Baltimore, and D.C.) during rush hour and it will take you 4+ hours to get home - assuming no wrecks or other issues to stop traffic.
Heading east out of El Paso to Fort Stockton and beyond is pretty horrible. But it better than being in El Paso.
It would be interesting to fill in a map as this thread goes along, to see if eventually it can cover every road in America.
The Macarthur Maze, in Berkeley after getting off the Bay Bridge from SF. 580 East and 80 West are the same stretch of road for part of it, just to give an example of how confusing it is (and no, this is not a joke). It gets really bad when the freeways separate, because the signs do not warn you very far in advance which lane you need to be in for which freeway. That means there are always people trying to get across several lanes of heavy traffic to avoid getting on the wrong freeway.
Anywhere where you go into a tunnel in Pittsburgh. For some reason, some drivers slow down before going into the tunnel, even if the traffic in the tunnel is not moving more slowly than the traffic outside. I have never met anyone who admits to doing this, and everybody I talk to shares my annoyance with this habit. But SOMEBODY is doing it, and they must die.
Pittsburgh has its share of one-way streets downtown and around the University of Pittsburgh, too. Fifth Avenue in Oakland (near Pitt) is one-way, but has a bus lane going in the opposite direction. This kind of thing confuses newcomers to town. It’s especially bad around Pitt and Carnegie Mellon when the students move in in the fall- you’ve got people not knowing where they are going, plus people parking illegally.
The Parkway West inbound (376 East) on the approach to the Fort Pitt Tunnel turns into a mess with any hint of heavy traffic. At least part of the problem is that people who have just gotten onto the parkway have to merge across lanes to get out of the exit only lanes. There are also the jagoffs who slow down for no reason before going into the tunnel.