Also interesting to note is that there are like, 5 different signs that you see around this section of I-5 southbound. Numerous speed signs leading up to this, numerous exit only signs on all sides (since you also have left exits/entrances), and then you have this up there.
I’m not making excuses for speeders, don’t speed. But I am saying that by the time you get to that 30 mph sign you’re cognitively overloaded and thrilled you made the exit, and you probably don’t know that it’s not a 30 mph exit but a 20 mph exit. I’d wager most people are so overloaded they don’t even notice the 20 mph sign.
I can’t seem to post a link to the photo, but I work at ACT theatre which is directly below the camera. An Amazon Fresh truck rammed into our ticket office in 2016. Came off the freeway too fast and broke our window.
Yes, mon! Jamaicans are mellow AF until they’re behind the wheel! The shitty pothole’d roads are not helpful when madly careering about in a car, neither!
I vaguely remember being a passenger while a friend drove along this Seattle shitshow. I was constantly amazed by Seattle’s all but ubiquitously lousy freeway design.
As a bonus, Seattleites can’t drive in the rain for shit, despite its raining half the year! I also enjoyed the rush hour 3X/day during the late 80s. Yup. A bonus one at lunchtime.
I also remember their having at least one of those potentially pancaking freeway affairs, w/a top section that could collapse and crush the lower level given an intense enough earthquake.
That was my first thought reading these comments! There are also some real winners near Wilmington, DE.
If only the folks in PA were driving that slowly. They see the route number on I-95 as a suggestion!
My faves are the PA “Weave Area” signs on I-95 North where folks merge in from the left at 322 and have to cross four lanes on I-95 to reach the Commodore Barry Bridge exit; South Street on the Schuylkill Expressway; I-95 above Christiana to the Wilmington, DE exit - where failing to merge across 5 lanes (including cars merging from the left) means getting stuck on the bridge approach to New Jersey*; and where 495 South meets I-95 in New Castle, DE. Good Scary times.
Bad highway design takes so much effort and money to fix. I’ve only seen it done successfully a few times. Most cases involved eliminating traffic circles or six-way intersections, but PennDOT did a good job with Route 202 (so far).
*I quit a job over that one, because every day after work I wondered if that would be the day I’d have to drop in on my parents and crash there overnight because I couldn’t make it back to my place in PA.
It’s all the stuff of nightmares. Literal ones, in my case. I have awful dreams fairly regularly re: driving on some freeway, and coming to an impossibly steep bridge that’s the exit I must take. Sometimes impossible curves, w/ or w/o incline are in the same dream as the bridge, sometimes they get their own separate dreams.
I live in hope that winning my probate case will end them for good.
Plus, imagine a situation where you are about to miss the exit, and at the last minute cross several lanes of traffic to get to the exit lane. All your concentration was in getting to the exit lane itself, not considering that this was a non-traditional exit.
This exit cries out for rumble strips or something else that physically restricts speed (aside from actual collisions).
Meanwhile, all the reddit comments for this are typical and libertarian-American: “They deserve it! / Can’t they read a sign? / Well, they’ll be fewer bad drivers after such fatalities.”
I’m sorry that this has invaded your dreams! I don’t normally have nightmares about driving, but about a month ago I dreamed of driving too far on a bascule bridge. It was really about not paying attention while driving because I was lost, started trying to reset my GPS while in motion (instead of pulling over), and didn’t notice until it was too late that I’d driven past where all of the other cars had stopped. Somehow I got out of the car before it went over the side, and the sound of grinding gears woke me up. Thank goodness for the neighborhood trash truck, because dreaming about clinging to the side of a bridge would probably make my acrophobia even worse.
I lived in Seattle for at least a decade before I even attempted the northbound Olive Way exit, another one that requires crossing three lanes of traffic to get in the right lane while people entering try to move left, all of it in a tunnel, then hitting daylight as you make the exit.
At least my experiences on that prepared me for the one time I drove a car in Manhattan - on the FDR Drive during rush hour.
