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
Every highway in Connecticut, for a variety of reasons. Too many two-lane highways. Too many left exits off of and entrances onto the highways. Too many routes that are a mish-mash of limited access highway, primary road, and secondary road, with abandoned dreams sprinkled in everywhere, and of course there is no direct route to anywhere, with the possible exception of Bridgeport to New Haven, or New Haven to Hartford. The rest is at least 40% longer in terms of time and distance than “as the crow flies”.
Omg yes, we moved from Connecticut and the DOT was in big money’s pockets for years. Instead of having actual bypass highways around Hartford, 91 and 84 were built to go right past the Traveler’s Insurance building, through the ‘mixmaster’ of right entrances to left exits, until they built the flyover.
“The Eisenhower” between “Wolf and the Jane Byrne” (because every road in Chicago has to have names that we don’t really use to sign it.) It’s I290 between I294 and downtown. A nightmare of bottlenecks and alternating left and right exits that backs up for miles the moment gramma taps her brakes because someone’s trying to pass her on the shoulder.
Amen to this, the inbound Ike also has a particularly nasty 5-way interchange that used to be called “The Hillside Strangler”, because the suburb of Hillside is right there. Still sucks to this day, many mornings stacked out past Rt 83.
Let me disagree that is a good road in some situations. In Pennsylvania I live in a tiny community with not much money. Outside of my driveway is a road called 219. In the winter if we get snow I look outside. If it isn’t travel able I go back to bed. Because it is the 1st road plowed. Sorry you have traffic jams try a foot of snow instead of cars. Haha. Cars move snow doesn’t. However if you want to shovel out my driveway so I get to the road okay.
I-81 and I-66 in Virginia are up there, also the Beltway. Everyone around DC drives like they’ve never been on a highway before and are completely terrified at the experience, with a white knuckle grip and no spacial awareness or even slight attempt to follow the rules of the road.
And I-95 through Delaware and Pennsylvania is pretty bad, as is I-476. Traffic is always heavy, people are either completely inattentive or ridiculously aggressive.
My biggest complaint with 81 is that the spine of Virginia is BOOOOOOOOORING. I prefer 95 to 85, at least when going southbound.
Interstate 10 in the Florida Panhandle. What a worthless piece of real estate. It does the job efficiently enough but it just drones on forever. And God help you if you’re traveling west during sunset. The road is perfectly aimed at the sun.
US-19 in Florida from Spring Hill to Clearwater.
Came here to post this. Specifically to Dunedin, where we live, and the highway goes interstate-y to points south. That part is good until above St. Petersburg where it becomes surface road again. Then it’s awful again.
For me in the Toronto area, it’s the stretch of highway 401 between highway 427 and highway 400.
Tons of truck traffic, people cutting in and out, a westbound hill that many drivers refuse to keep their speed up on, a horrible eastbound offramp for Black Creek Drive and other issues.
Plus it’s the busiest stretch of highway in North America.
Have have specifically moved homes so that I wouldn’t have to drive that section of road on my daily commute anymore.
E Kelly Road in Pharr, TX.
Looking a Google Maps, it must have been redone but a little more than a decade ago there was a few mile stretch that was nothing but pot holes. My wife used to travel around to different schools and give nursing program demonstrations. One night she came home after traveling down this pop-marked stretch of asphalt and told me there was something wrong with her car. I went out side to find the front corner of the facia cracked and sagging, the fog lamp cracked. One of the large potholes was too big to avoid.
Interstate 95 in Virginia. I don’t know what it is about 95, specifically from just south of Richmond to DC but it makes people forget how to drive. You get south of Richmond with the same traffic level and there are no issues.
It’s awful. You will have 60 mph+ to 0 mph back to 60 mph at 9 o clock at night on a Friday with little traffic for no apparent reason. Repeatedly.
Came here to say this.
Except it’s stupid ’til you get south of Petersburg.
And 64 between Short Pump and Norfolk isn’t much better.
Because Semis (and Semi wannabes), Altimas, Hellcats (and Hellcat wannabes), Floridians and New Yorkers.
I chalk it up to the general level of stupidity among the population – and the belief among many that they’re NASCAR drivers (more wrecks on race weekends)
LA freeways are a treat in comparison.
There’s a sign on I-95 as you enter the Richmond metro area that indicates you’re entering a “Highway Safety Corridor.” I think it was put there ironically. I do like the implication that the rest of I-95 on either side of the city are Highway Danger Corridors, though.
First world problems…Centennial Blvd, between our old house in Colorado Springs and the grocery store. Just about 2.25 miles, with FIVE traffic lights, some within just a couple hundred yards of each other. Guaranteed to hit at least 4 red, turning a five minute drive into a 15 minute drive.
Gilman Springs Road in inland Southern California. This is a road that seems to have been designed by a genius with a Master’s degree in inducing road rage.
It started out as a low-traffic farm road but as one of very few ways in and out of a rapidly growing valley, it’s way over capacity and just getting worse. The nearly decade-long construction project that’s worked on intermittently will bring it up to a capacity that would have been good about 20 years ago before the big growth spike in the area.
This is a 10-mile stretch of road with only 2 lanes and over the years several passing zones have been removed so whatever traffic you’re behind when you get on this stretch of road, you’re going to be behind them the entire way. There are only 2 roads leading anywhere that even intersect it so if it gets really jammed up your only options usually are to wait or attempt a dangerous and illegal u-turn. The road is narrow and slightly curvy which means you have a disproportionate number of drivers who get scared, start off below the 55mph speed limit, and stay on the brakes the entire time they see oncoming traffic. More than once I’ve been stuck behind someone who regularly slowed to 20 mph or below. You can imagine the miles-long clot of cars giving great examples of standing waves this generates behind them during rush hours.
Currently this road has only 1 passing zone and it almost makes things worse. More often than not you won’t be able to get ahead of slow traffic anyway because either that slow traffic will hit warp speed in the passing zone only to spike the brakes at the end, or because half the cars behind them pulled into the left lane and spent the next mile casually passing one single car – if they bothered passing anyone at all. They recently also added a traffic light that’s so poorly programmed that 2-3 mile backups are a regular occurrence. One of the few businesses on this road is a quarry so there’s also enough heavy truck traffic to very quickly damage it even after complete repaving.
All this adds up to spectacular displays of road rage which often end up as badly as you’d expect. Just this last week 6 people died when someone tried passing on the right through a right-turn / merging lane and ran out of room.
I-70 west of Denver between 470 and Dillon/Silverthorne on Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons in winter and summer. You WILL hit traffic, the only question is how many extra hours your drive will take (if you don’t give up first). If there is even a little snow and/or if its a holiday weekend, best bring enough supplies to survive a couple of days.
Best day ever was when Denver was in the Superbowl. No traffic at all between Denver and Winter Park. NONE. It was post-apocalyptic. But we didn’t speed because we figured the cops would be pissed they were missing the game.
I was going to nominate I-25, but yours sounds about right. A while ago I went fishing for a week in Oklahoma. It was the best! Big fish, no people, lots of relaxing. Coming back through Kansas someone called out my green plates and asked what I was doing. “Fishing in OK.” They replied: “That’s a shame with the mountains you have.” Obviously they haven’t tried a camping vacation west of Denver recently.
Especially now that Floyd Hill is under construction for the next few years.
Building off this one and getting more specific to this stretch of highway, Floyd Hill heading west is particularly awful for a few reasons. First being traffic, if it is an afternoon or evening close to the weekend (because it seems like nobody works on Friday in this state) there will be traffic. Stop and go traffic heading west because it drops to 2 lanes at the top of the hill. If by some miracle there is not traffic, you are greeted by a winding, narrow lane steep grade with a sharp turn at the bottom, that also has expansion joints. I was not paying attention in my truck (with a solid from axle and leaf springs) and hit this going 75 and nearly crashed. Additionally, there is above spot for a speed trap about 3/4 the way down this hill, and the speed limit drops to 55 instead of the usual 65. And now it is under construction, to make everything mentioned above even worse. But hopefully this construction project on it will improve this stretch. The way CDOT functions, they will improve it just enough to handle the capacity that was on the road in 2015.
Every single one in New Yorks big archipelago. Some roads are 6 to 8 lanes of one way(!) roads where every block is like 30 yards long.
The one time I drove through it I felt like I had to drive all around the city just because I made it down the wrong way.
In Quebec we have the infamous Autoroute 50. It has the nickname “Autoroute de la mort”.
It’s technically a freeway, with freeway speed limits, but is mostly a 2 lane country road with overpasses and very few passing zones.
Now, for these stats, remember the highway is only 87km (55mi) long:
In ten years (2012-2022) there were 34 fatal collisions, 81 serious collisions, and 846 minor collisions along Autoroute 50.
There are even some that use it for suicide by accident.
Back in Portland it was Foster Road. Hey, let’s take a heavily-traveled four-lane road through an urban area and take away two lanes to make bike lanes and a center turn lane! That’ll help. Dishonorable mention to I-205 just for being the ugly miserable parking lot it becomes every day at rush hour.
Here in Maryland, it’s… all of them. Pretty much. But that’s mostly because they’re full of Maryland drivers. The roads themselves are OK.
Good god.. Foster Road was such a shit show, especially heading east any time after about 3:00. I lived on the west side, and that exit from northbound Barbur onto the Ross Island Bridge was also pretty terrible.
York Road in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.
It’s a fairly major connecting road but the problem is that the provincial and municipal governments don’t actually agree who is responsible for maintaining it, or exactly how much maintenance they should be putting in. Because of this, any work on York Road required negotiation between the two governments, and because neither of them wanted to do the negotiation the road was generally last on the list when it came to improvement.
However, because it’s a connecting road and goes through an industrial area, it also had a ton of heavy truck traffic, as well as regular traffic. So it was an absolute mess, but a mess that nobody could agree to fix.
Every single person who worked in that area had some damage caused by York Road.
Along with others I’ll mention I-95, specifically southbound from the Fairfax County line to somewhere south of Fredericksburg where it always backs up regardless of time of day or presence of wrecks as the carriageway narrows from four lanes to three. The HOT lane is worth the money, although it’s still backed up until well past Fredericksburg.
US-13 between the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and Dover. It’s not the traffic that’s a problem but the utter monotony of a surface highway that runs through a number of small towns on Virginia’s Eastern Shore where you have to slow down to 45 or 35 mph. In Maryland there’s a limited-access, freeway-standard bypass around Salisbury that soothes the agitated soul a little, but then back to the slog until you hit the entrance to Delaware Route 1, which is another toll road that’s worth every dime.
The I-64 Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel between Norfolk and Hampton. Always check the traffic reports no matter what time of day or year you have to go through it. I never go up to the Virginia Peninsula because of the constant risk off a jam unless I’m headed through on I-64 to points west and I used to default to the alternate I-664 tunnel until that started backing up regularly too. They’re expanding the HRBT with a HOT lane that will also be worth every dime because you can’t easily detour it and can’t easily get off the highway and wait it out at a restaurant or something.
You beat me to it. I learned to drive on the stretch of I-95 from Richmond to DC while living in Fredericksburg. It’s why I’m pretty much unfazed by anything short of LA or NYC or DC itself.
I don’t go up or through DC often, and I’ve always had good luck on the Beltway when I have. And even I-95 northbound is within acceptable limits for fast-growing exurbs and all. But southbound is fifty miles of ugly that gets a little longer and a little uglier every year.
I-93 south of Boston. I’ve only driven on it twice and at least the second time I new what I was getting into. We were in stop and go traffic from 90 to 95 to 93, hours worth. Patience is starting to run thin and we start seeing people blast by the traffic on the shoulder. These cars are literally travelling highway speed on the shoulder while traffic is barely moving, and people are still trying to get off at various exits. So so many near disastrous crashes (I won’t use the word accident). Then we pass a sign that says “when traffic use shoulder.” Are you kidding?! This madness is state sponsored? Massachusetts, my least favorite state in the union.
Fuckin Highway 18 from i90 on Snoqualmie pass pretty much to Tacoma. Holy hell is it bad. Narrow, full of potholes, absolutely clogged with traffic from interstate drivers trying to access the entire southern half of the Puget Sound region, as well as the entire Kitsap and Olympic Peninsula. Doesn’t help that a billion weird suburbs have popped up along 18 in the past 20-30 years. Just sucks. It by far my least favorite part of the drive from Eastern WA to the OP.
Honorable mentions- i5 through Tacoma. Ya like cones?
Good ol’ Highway 26 from Vantage to Pullman. CAN be fine, but god help you if you attempt it during harvest, or when students are returning to Pullman.
It’s undoubtedly here in the DC area. We have some of the worst and most chaotic roads in the country. I’m not sure that I can pick just one so here are a few. The first is Rhode Island Avenue.
For those unfamiliar this is one of the main vein roads in the city that more or less connects NE DC with NW DC and continues into Maryland. It’s basically Fury Road. There are no rules, no masters, and there is literally always traffic. Midnight on a Sunday? Bumper to bumper. 2pm on a Tuesday? Traffic. Rush hour? Just stay away.
There are some other DC streets that I hate for basically identical reasons as well, like Bladensburg Road, New York Avenue, etc. Basically stay away all main veins in the city unless you have no other choice. 295 is a nightmare as well because it’s also Fury Road. No laws apply when you’re on it and there’s no shoulder so you can’t get pulled over. You just have to cross your fingers and hope today isn’t the day when a speeding Nissan sends you into the great beyond.
Other than that I95 between Richmond and DC is the most cursed stretch of road that has ever existed and no one is going to convince me otherwise. The section between DC and Fredericksburg in particular is a crime worthy of The Hague. But I’ve lost days of my life in the stretch between Freddyburg and Richmond as well.
Oh and I64 is horrifying. It’s basically a high speed run through the woods with no shoulder. Everyone is doing 15 over at all times and the gnarliest accidents I’ve ever seen have been on it. I still vividly remember driving to the beach with my friends way back in the day, hearing a deafening bang, and being stopped for an hour straight. When we finally got moving we drove past a car that had hit a tree. It was literally a crumpled hunk of metal and there were body bags strewn about in a 100 foot radius.
It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. And on a drive back from the beach once there was another accident on 64 that stopped traffic completely for an hour, and while they got it cleaned up more before I got there there was literally a detached axle sitting on the shoulder. How does that even happen? But anyway, 64 lives in my nightmares and I literally have changed my route from DC to the Outer Banks to avoid it. Driving with all the traffic going 80 in a 55 through the woods is just too much of a white knuckle ride for me.
610 W Loop in Houston in general with the stretch between I-10 and I-69 specifically
Beat me to it. Many cities have natural barriers to transportation like a big river or a mountain pass, bay, lake, or some such… Houston doesn’t so we built one.
I 87 between Albany NY and Saratoga. Every weekend it’s bumper to bumper. Sammy Hagar wrote “I can’t drive 55” about it.
The merge of route 7 before the twin bridges is utter shit for sure.
I-70 between St. Louis (more specifically Wentzville, MO, where the rural four-lane section begins) and Columbia, MO. The lane etiquette of drivers here is atrocious, mixed with a lot of trucks, and a wide range of speeds.
Any freeway. Pick anyone, except the I-70 through the Rockies, and they all suck. I drive them when I have to.
Bonus points for the I-90/I-90/I-94 bottleneck though northern Indiana just outside of Chicago and also any single freeway in and around Toronto. No freeway in southern California can hold a candle to either of those two abortions.
The trick is to stay on the 90 (Skyway) and then take Indiana 912 Cline Av through the Gary stacks, back around and you pick up 90 again AFTER the split from 94.
At least, that used to work.
I35 through the middle of Austin is a traffic nightmare, 635 through DFW is a beat down with traffic and construction and 49 south from Shreveport to Lafayette is incredibly dull.. honestly there’s so many..