So often as car enthusiasts, we pontificate and fantasize about our favorite driving roads. Oh, there’s that squiggly one in Italy, and the glory of the touge in Japan. But I want to ask you something altogether more irritating—what’s your least favorite road?
I’m not asking in the general sense. Yes, we all hate city streets that don’t have car parks where we need them. We all hate that annoying cul de sac where our ex lived where you could never turn around without making a six-point turn. But I want you to be more specific. What road, what singular stretch of sign-posted tarmac earns your undying enmity to this day?
I raise this because for me, the answer is very easy. It’s a long, asphalted turd that wears the imaginitive moniker of South Road. That’s because the South Australian government didn’t think this hateful piece of infrastructure deserved any more attention than that during the naming process. Why is it so bad? Oh, let me tell you.
“Uh, this is it.” Credit: YellowMonkey via CC BY-SA 4.0
You don’t care about the geographic specifics because you’re not from my hometown of Adelaide. So I’ll just tell you why it sucks. It’s because it’s a major highway that technically stretches a full 117 kilometers in length. That might make you think it has a broad, multi-laned layout where you travel at high speeds with a minimum of intersections and traffic lights. Oh, buddy. No, it’s the opposite!
In the southern suburbs of Adelaide, this thing becomes a regular street. It goes down to two lanes in each direction. There are shops, side roads, and houses all over the place, and traffic slows to an absolute crawl. It’s so thick that for a good 12 hours a day, it’s virtually impossible to turn across traffic. Most of the time you can’t even do a U-turn, so you end up pulling into a shopping center’s parking lot and then pulling back out onto the road.
I hate this damn road so much because for a good six months, I had to commute on it a full three days a week. I’d spend a good ten kilometers of my journey just inching along, bumper to bumper, agonizingly making my way to work. And this wasn’t even in peak hour—this was at midday.
I will get over it in time. I’ve moved a long, long way from South Road. But still, it remains one of the biggest thoroughfares in the city of Adelaide and it’s just an absolute pain in the butt.
Anyway, I’ve raged long enough. That’s my least favorite road. Now you should tell me yours. Let your hatred run free like the waters of the Nile. Then let it go. You deserve peace.
Image credits: YellowMonkey via CC BY-SA 4.0, Lewin Day, Government of South Australia – Department for Infrastructure and Transport, Albert Stoynov via Unsplash License
My least favorite road is pretty much any road in Michigan that is more than 1 winter old.
Merritt Parkway.
In theory it’s beautiful, in reality it’s a nightmare.
It is beautiful, but it was designed for cars from 100 years ago, and the old money around there won’t allow the state to do much to update it.
Anywhere on I-45 in the Houston Metro area.
Most of LA’s surface streets and all of her “free”ways except the 2. I love driving on the 2. Hwy110 North of I-5 up through Pasadena is a hellhole if there’s any traffic at all, glorious to carve at 2am and no one around.
The 2 probably would be worse had it been completed to plan all the way to Century City, but the proposed namesake for the Beverly Hills Freeway stopped that by insisting it be built underground in the city if it was to be built at all (ironically, Beverly Hills held up subway expansion for years because they didn’t want tunnelling that was allegedly a potential safety risk for Beverly Hills High School). It was one of the first successful freeway revolts in the ’60s.
R0, the Brussels Ring. Used to be great to drive at 120 km/h or even 140 km/h most of the way round but in 2020 during you-know-what when nobody was driving, they sneakily reduced the speed limit to 100 km/h in the bit in Flanders (to be fair, the bit in Wallonia, which is most of it, is still 120 km/h). Problem is, there are currently 5 separate road construction projects on the Ring. The Ring is only 75 km long, so you are guaranteed to run into a huge traffic jam every 15 km.
Pretty much every single road in London is my least favorite road. I never thought I would miss the roads around Frankfurt, but I definitely do.
Highway 412 through Springdale, Arkansas.
Sweet fancy Moses…
Why, you ask, is the main thoroughfare through a modestly sized city in Arkansas your most hated road?
Lemme fill you in.
A few years back, the teachers here in Oklahoma went on strike. I didn’t want my kids just sitting at home, so I took a day off work every now and then to take them adventuring.
One day, we decided to go to Eureka Springs and check out Onyx Cave. Google Maps took us through Springdale. However, when we got to the city limits, the route took us off the main road, the aforementioned Highway 412, and through a maze of side streets and neighborhoods. Google insisted stating on 412 would add 45 minutes, despite being shorter!
Seemed weird, but whatever. I followed Google and it was uneventful. Did the same coming home.
When the weekend rolled around, we decided to go back to Eureka Springs, but this time accompanied by my wife. When we got to Springdale, same weird route, same claim of 45 minutes.
On our way home that evening, we decided to see if Google was right.
JESUS TAPDANCING CHRIST WHAT A SHITSHOW!!!
Nearly an HOUR of bumper-to-bumper, beep and creep traffic normally only seen on the LA freeways in the worst of rush hour during Christmas shopping season while under a terrorist attack. There are only some 87k people in Springdale proper, and pretty much every one of them must have gotten in their car and driven down 412.
What.
The.
Fuuuuuuu….
That gave me a chuckle
I’m a DC-area local, so that should explain my choices.
I-95. It’s never a good time.
I-395 into DC.
I-495 at the 270 interchange in Maryland. Nobody knows where the hell they’re going and so you end up with crisscrossing Marylanders and Virginians trying to get into their correct lane too late, despite knowing it was coming.
Honestly, Maryland in general.
I-295 through DC. Awful. Wretched. Bothered. Not staying in its lane.
I-85 through Atlanta. So many lanes and they’re all blocked.
I don’t live in the DC area, but I think even NYers and Bostonians who have visited agree, DC roads and traffic are pure nightmare fuel.
CA 880 east of the San Francisco Bay. Like many a classic villain, 880 didn’t start out bad. Its origin is the twisty, scenic (though sometimes lethal) Highway 17 that runs from the Pacific coast town of Santa Cruz, across the coastal mountains and down into Los Gatos. But once it got into the big city, it changed its name to 880 and turned evil. Crappy pavement, over-crowded, sudden lurches from Silicon Valley commuters doing 70 to stop-and-go. Trucks desperately trying to get out of the East Bay and deliver their cargo before the whole road turns to gridlock. When you’re inching along you have plenty of time to reflect on how what was undoubtedly once a lovely landscape of oaks and grassland has turned into a wasteland of tilt-up concrete buildings and concertina wire topped storage yards. The Tesla factory is along 880, so there’s that….
You are right. 880 in the East Bay is the worst freeway in the Bay. You forgot to mention all the shitty Prius drivers that have now upgraded to Model 3’s and Ys all over the place.
I-395 in DC is absolutely bonkers and the worst road I have to regularly take (or avoid)
The “World’s First Superhighway”, the Pennsylvania Turnpike (mostly I-76). Listen, the history is fascinating. From Mechanicsburg to Irwin, it loosely follows what was supposed to be a railroad, including (when built) the remains of 7 tunnels. Originally the tunnels made the road go from 4 lanes (divided) to two lanes through the tunnels. Traffic would back up for miles. In the late 60’s, 4 tunnels were doubled, and three were bypassed. One accident in the mountains and the detours can be absolutely insane. Tolls increase every year. Construction is never-ending. State Troopers love it from the perspective of issuing tickets. Trucks in the mountains are always having slow races. People love (for some unknown reason) to do 45 in the hammer lane and ignore flash for pass. And some of the on/off ramps are really tight, so proper acceleration/deceleration can be tricky, and the trucks can’t get up to speed or have to start slowing down long before the actual exit. Oh, and don’t forget the weather in the mountains. Snow, ice, pea-soup fog, high crosswinds, you can have it all at the same time on a bad day. One time it was bad enough for me to put my Dakota in 4-low just to keep going over the ridges. As much as there are places where it’s the “most efficient” for me to drive, I hate it.
Related, NOBODY gets flash to pass anymore. I used to do it, but quickly realized absolutely nobody understood what I meant, up to the point of it inducing road rage.
It could be a beautiful rural road, but Rt 32 North from MA into NH was such a broken down stretch of frost heaves and patched potholes that I actual crossed it off my map. That was 20 years ago so maybe it’s fixed now
The 405 between the 10 and LAX. You’ve either got the worse traffic you’ve ever seen, or you get to enjoy a road surface that shakes your fillings loose.
Having lived in Long Beach for 5 years, I can confirm this is correct. I avoided it at all costs.
Any freeway in SoCal at 5pm Mon-Friday.
But really, it’s probably the stretch of the 15 up through El Cajon Pass and on through Victorville. It’s a bottleneck that’s just getting worse every year and once you’re up out of the pass there isn’t much to look at for 50 miles. That combined with near constant construction (sometimes reducing it to one lane) make it one of my least favorite places to drive.
My least favorite road is I-285 in Atlanta. I used to commute on 285 12 miles each way 5 days per week. My drive to work wasn’t bad, but the commute home took anywhere from 40 minutes to well over an hour.
As much as I hated commuting on 285, driving wasn’t the worst part since my house was right next to the road (~90 feet away). It was very loud in my yard, as expected (during rush hour, traffic was so loud it could be hard to carry on a conversation at times), but it was also loud inside my house. There was one closet where you couldn’t hear traffic noise, but traffic was audible everywhere else. 2 PM on a Sunday? Traffic noise. 4 AM on a Thursday? Traffic noise. 1 AM on Christmas morning? You bet there was traffic noise. The only time I didn’t hear traffic was the time it snowed. Unfortunately, snow doesn’t last long in Atlanta. On the plus side, I like white noise when I sleep, so sleeping generally wasn’t a problem (it took weeks for me to be able to sleep without traffic noise after I moved).
Worse than traffic noise was the constant honking. I lived about a mile south of a major interchange where traffic would back up. During these backups, vehicles, including a lot of semi trucks, constantly honked their stupid horns. Out of curiosity I got an app to measure sound intensity; it was common for truck horns to measure 80 decibels in my living room.
Worse than the honking were the pandemic motorcycle packs. Groups of sport bikes used 285 as a racetrack during the pandemic when traffic was reduced. A pack of sport bikes (not a single of which had stock exhaust) passing 100 feet away at 100+ mph is unbelievably loud. I was frequently woken up by those jabronis since they also insisted on riding in the middle of the night.
Oh, and there was this one dipshit with a Honda that was modified to backfire every time he let off the gas. My neighbors always thought it was gunfire. I knew it was just a muppet with an irritating car, but that didn’t make it any better.
If you think you hate driving on a shitty road, try living next to one.
In no particular order:
Us130 in NJ, north of the airport circle, through Burlington
Roosevelt Highway in Phila
I-95, especially between NYC and where I-20 splits off in SC
The DC beltway
All low-hanging fruit, I know.
US 22 in NJ, especially the easternmost stretch. It began as a simple two- or maybe four-lane highway. Then it got dualized. But rather than uproot all of the businesses on the eastbound side, the new eastbound lanes were run BEHIND those businesses. So now there were effectively in the median, with traffic entering and exiting to and from the fast lane. And of course there are U-turns cut through the median with the same dynamic. No acceleration lanes. Just wait for a gap, floor it and pray.
There is truly no crueler proving ground for new drivers in Jersey. I had to drive on this thing near daily in high school to get to my job after school. This required making a u-turn and then crossing three lanes of traffic in less than 100 feet
Oh man, I got rerouted off I-78 (also trash) onto US 22 heading west one time, and I was completely and utterly dumbfounded.
I forgot about the joys of driving on US 22 during my undergrad days at Kean University.
The state of Maryland.
Oh man, I have a few:
Rural Interstate: I-88 between Binghamton and Schenectady, NY. It’s been under construction my entire life, yet is still somehow war-torn. I have no idea how this highway is still this shitty.
Suburban Interstate: I-95 south of DC – what a piece of shit, I don’t live anywhere near there, yet I have been in multiple “worst traffic jams of my life” here. Kill it with fire.
Urban Interstate: The BQE/Major Deegan – wide cruise lanes these are not. Anxiety score = 100.
Stroad: NYS Route 7/Hoosick St. in Troy, NY – let’s have a bazillion lanes merge to 2, then to 1, then to 2, and then back to 1! On a hill! With no shoulders!
Not sure because I haven’t been there in years: US Route 222 between Allentown, PA and Reading, PA. This was my #1 for a long portion of my life, but I know that some traffic circles have been put in, and a bypass on the Allentown end has been completed. But dear God, this road was a nightmare back in the 00’s. Tons of merge points, traffic between two midsized cities down to one lane at times, and Amish horse/buggies! Total shit.
88 is what used to be 17 right? Yes, I think it has been under construction for decades now.
Here in Michigan, I-94, easy. It’s the primary route between Detroit and Chicago, and mostly two lanes, so there’s a right lane perpetually moving at 50 mph (assuming traffic is moving at all) that’s just an endless line of semis, and a left lane perpetually moving at 51mph that’s an endless line of cars passing the semis. Traffic generally moves fast enough that you have to pay attention because if you get in an accident you’ll die, but slowly enough that you can never just set your cruise and chill.
You forgot to mention the seemingly endless stretches of seemingly eternal construction that take us down to 1 lane. For.Ever.
US-12 is also dogshit in its own special way. Just small town after small town. Too many curves and little hills for any hope of ever passing the 95-year-old in their gold Buick going 10 under the speed limit.
I have a THIRD mention of I-80 on this list…
Nebraska. All of it. 495 miles of absolute bloody hell. Just shoot me.
Transported beef from North Platte to Omaha three times a week for a year. It’s pretty boring, full of trucks, and for some reason cell phone coverage is spotty. But I preferred it over the stretch of I-25 from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs.
I start in Chicago, so I have to do Nebraska AFTER Illinois and Iowa. By the time I get to the hotel in Laramie, I’m corned out.
Just don’t get behind a truck on Nebraska I-80 hauling hogs – the whole front of your car will be covered in black shit!
YES. I-80 through Nebraska is complete hell.
I used to always make sure to time my drives so I could make sure to get through that in one day and not have to stop.
I hate the drive on I-8 from Casa Grande to San Diego. What a freaking HOT boring drive!!
2nd would be AZ86 from Tucson to the Mexico boarder and then down to Rocky Point. First you get stopped 3-4 times by Boarder Patrol on the US side, then you get stopped a couple of times on the Mexico side by Federales or gangs.
3rd would be I-10 through El Paso!
I8 is pretty bad, but at least it gets interesting once you get into the sand dunes and stuff, then the climb up into the mountains near San Diego is kinda pretty. The stretch from Casa Grande to the California border is rough though. The 10 from Palm Springs to PHX metro is pretty terrible too.
Highway 400, between Toronto and Barrie. It’s a big commuter route, there’s plenty of truck traffic, it’s hilly enough to cause slowdowns (although not hilly enough for it to be for good reason), the northern bit sucks in winter from lake effect snow, and because it’s the route to cottage country, it’s basically a write-off every weekend over the summer (seriously, I’ve been in bumper-to-bumper on a random Sunday at like 10 at night).
You have my sympathy
I’ve driven that section of highway many times. To me it’s a close 2nd to the section of the 401 between the 400 and the 427.
I might rate the basketweave at Keele over anything west of the 401 (if just trying to get from the express and over to 400/Black Creek), but I mostly avoid it (now either getting on/off at Eglinton/427 or Jane/400, and little reason to go between). But yeah, very chaotic when express/collectors starts/stops.
Jackie Robinson Parkway, formerly known as the Interboro Parkway.
Close second place goes to the Southern State Parkway.
Oof. Southern State is a butt-clencher for sure.
Southern State at PSL +20 is a ton of fun.
Oh this is an easy one for me. I-5 through Downtown Seattle. You have on ramps coming from the left and people trying to get all the way over five lanes to the right to get off in insanely heavy traffic. Guess the wrong lane, and OOPS, you are getting off at an exit you didn’t intend to with very little warning. It’s a road that was designed for 1950s traffic and has never been updated.
When I go down there, I visit friends in West Seattle. You have to go through downtown then exit onto the West Seattle Bridge. If you take the I-5 through lane past I-90, you have to cross three lanes of traffic almost immediately to get to the exit. The secret is to use the collector distributor lanes at the I-90 exit so you in the right spot to get off after you pass that interchange. It is “technically” legal to do that thankfully.
Damn I hate that highway — it’s worse than Highway 99 through the Massey Tunnel on the way into Vancouver, and that’s bad.
This is a solid take. I used to work for a company out of Mountlake Terrace, in Seattle’s northern suburbs. There were a few times during HQ trips when it took me longer to drive from Sea-Tac to Mountlake Terrace than to fly from Denver to Seattle in the first place.
Plus, in Seattle, none of the surface streets go through, so if there’s a wreck on I5, you’re stuck.
I-65 in KY from about MM 112 to the Indiana border. The surfacing that’s been done to it makes it extremely loud in all but the most luxurious of cars. It’s also bumpy, with potholes and bad attempts at patches.
And then the toll bridge over the Ohio River for 1-65 between KY and IN. Customer service for the company that manages it has never been anything less than a disaster. I go out of my way to avoid it as much as possible, as 2 of the other 3 crossings in the area aren’t tolled. Even if it adds 10-15 minutes to a drive.
Yeah, River Link can go get fucked. Even if you have a transponder they will find a way to screw you.