Traffic Postponement
What’s the worst day you’ve ever had on the road? When I was in high school, me and my dad got trapped on the NY thruway for 3 hours because an overpass collapsed. It was awful.
Sunday was my personal worst behind the wheel. My wife had done a trail run around Mt Hood. On our way back, what should have been a nice breezy 1 hour scenic drive turned into a mess. An accident of some majorly grisly sort had occurred on one of the most remote sections of highway 26 south of Mt Hood. I moved about 100 yards in an hour, before the cops literally just turned everyone around, jamming everyone up the opposite way as everyone spun around and I spent the next hour moving about 200 yards back the way I came before the pace softened up to a nice 20 mph. There were no good detour roads out in this section of mountain pass unless you own an ATV. I had to drive an hour east, the opposite of the direction I was going, then an hour north, then another 1.5 hours home. On the way home on interstate 84 I got stuck in another traffic jam caused by another accident. We could not pull over and stop to take breaks because it was 100 fucking degrees outside and stepping out of the car felt like lighting myself on fire.
I finally truly understood how my dad felt that day on the thruway.
Anyway I got home too late and too angry to finish a comic so check back tomorrow and share your traffic horror stories.
Few years back I had to take students to a conference that was 6 hours away. So first I was in charge of about 12 high schoolers at a leadership conference overnight. On the way back, it snowed on ALL the roads going back to our home town, so we were effectively shut out, meaning I had to work with our principal to find a hotel for everyone last minute. Then, next day, we had to drive an additional 3 hours ALL THE WAY AROUND A MOUNTAIN just to get home. It was a freaking nightmare.
1) Was driving southbound on I-5 near Chehalis, WA, normal traffic, nothing out of the ordinary – then an elderly lady (approximately 94 at the time) was driving northbound on the southbound lanes. Had to dive into a van next to me or take her on head on… Scariest thing I’ve ever encountered – 1997.
2) We had to go south May, 1980. My oldest sister was due with her 3rd child. Child was born on May 18. Traffic coming back was plain evil… Not because of volume, but because of ash from Mt. St. Helens. My dad insisted to drive through, regardless of conditions, and it was slow, miserable, and eventually killed our car.
One absolutely baltic December day in the mid-1980s, we were heading home after seeing my gran in hospital, when the car just up and conked right the hell out. On a downward sloping road. Right slap-ass-bang in the middle of Durham (). In hilariously icy conditions. It was that much of a gradient we had to angle the car so it lodged in an iron fence on the path to the left. We were stuck there four hours as traffic just wormed its way past us, everyone giving us the filthiest of looks in our shitty A-reg Nissan Cherry, while the RAC struggled to get to us.
I’d never been that cold before, nor again – not even at 2am one February 2010 morning in York train station, on my way for a site visit to Keele Uni in Staffordshire as a potential AmeCon venue. I could not feel my radio dials.
I had a front row seat to the aftermtch of a high-speed head-on collision. I didn’t see it happen, but I was able to see the wreckage before the flames and smoke engolfed the remains and the bodies.
It wasn’t emotionally bad but the traffic coming back from Madras Oregon after the eclipse was biblical
When I was 16, my father and I were out purchasing a bike off Craigslist at a local park. On the way home, we got on a roundabout that would take us to the highway. My dad wasn’t paying attention and we ended up on the Peace Bridge to Canada. We had to pull off to the investigation station and stand 50 feet away as Canadian border patrol and customs spent 25 minutes searching the entire car for contraband. Dumped out our water bottles and everything.
I’ve not had any huge backups but one day I had to be on the road when it snowed (I live in NC, that basically never happens cut me some slack) and an off ramp was moving slow. Some truck got impatient and turned around and went back up the off ramp, into oncoming traffic, over a hill he couldn’t see over. Very safe.
We were the first car in line in the Baltimore Harbor tunnel once when an accident happened in front of us. The tunnel was closed for hours and we had gotten out of the car to throw the football around. Eventually, police turned all the cars around and we drove the wrong way out of the tunnel and then back into an open bore.
This weekend we went to see relatives an hour south. Usually that means south on interstate A, west on interstate B, then south on state highway S. There’s another east-west interstate (C) that crosses A just north of B. The merging of people going from C to A while the A people are trying to get to B is always a mess.
To get us around construction traffic on A, the navigation software had us exit A to get on C westbound. I was excited . . . maybe we’d learn an alternate way to get onto S! No, it had us take an exit immediately following the onramp. It took us south on a surface street where we immediately rejoined C _eastbound_. C and A are largely parallel at that point, so less than two miles later it had us take the exit to get back onto A southbound, putting us in perfect position to take the same ramp from A to B we always take.
Love the cameo by your dog
Was driving from WNY to South Florida. A snowstorm started coming through the day I had to go back, and so I decided to outrace it, heading to Syracuse and then cutting down and through PA. Unfortunately, the snowstorm smacked into me right when I was on the 81. There were cars down everywhere, because people decided to just… go 60 MPH in a whiteout? I watched a few people more or less total their cars around me, it was like Mad Max. I managed to get to some little mining town or something, where they glared at me as I drank coffee and tried to unclench my hands. Every hour of snowstorm driving feels like 10.
Me and my dad were going to the NASCAR race up in the Poconos last year. It was smooth sailing for 90% of the trip- until we hit the mother of all traffic jams about 10-15 miles from the racetrack. It took us an hour to move what can’t have been one quarter of a mile- if I didn’t bring two books with me in the car I might have snapped. We ended up about an hour late to the race and if Dad hadn’t taken a shortcut onto the first road he saw, we might have missed the entire thing. Needless to say, we’ll be leaving much earlier this year.
Stuck on the Capitol Beltway for three hours on a Friday when all of DC was getting out to go home. Not fun.
Was almost expecting the dog to be yelling “AHHHH!” like the Metroid Prime comic.
I had a similar experience to you Dave. I was on my way home from a longer trip. I was 6.5 hours into a 7 hour drive from Socal to Central Coast where I live at like 7pm. There was a fatality accident on the highway I was on, and they completely closed the highway. Over 2 hours of basically not moving and then two more hours detouring through tiny backstreets to bypass the only pass over a mountain range.
Worst part: my Grandma was waiting at the rental car place to drive me home, and this was before I had a cellphone. our planned meet time was 8pm, I ended up getting there at 12:30am.
Maybe 25 years ago, I had been visiting my friends in Boston. Driving home Sunday night, I discovered that apparently MA, CT, *and* NY had all decided to do construction on most of the major roads at the same time. CT even managed to do the impossible – they closed 4.5 lanes a 3 lane highway. (How, you ask? They had the left shoulder completely closed, and part of the right shoulder, meaning everyone ended up having to drive nearly 5 miles with wheels on the grass.)
What was normally about a 3.5-4 hour drive took over 7 hours. By the time I got back onto the NJ Turnpike, I was so relieved to be back on a sane road with no traffic that I had to fight my urge to slam the gas pedal down.
Granted, I chose to head into it knowing it would be bad… but it was somehow worse than even I could have conceived.
I attended the first NASCAR Cup race at Texas Motor Speedway with my father and grandfather. Most of the onsite parking was dirt and grass and it had poured rain the week prior to the race. Given this and the expected huge crowd for the first race, it was advised that fans park off site and take a shuttle bus to the track and back. So we got up before dawn and spent an hour in traffic getting into the parking garage to take the shuttle bus, another hour standing in line for a shuttle bus, and another hour or two sitting in traffic on the shuttle bus getting into the track (the off site parking was less than 10 miles away). After the race it was a similar story, hour in line to board the bus and then three plus hours back to the parking garage, much of which I spent standing on that bus. With traffic absolutely stuck getting into the race, some people had decided to park their cars on the highway medians and walk miles to the track… and then they caught the shuttle bus on the way back, and had the bus stop when they got near their car (which I found infuriating). When we finally made it back to our car, there was another 30-40 minutes of bad traffic getting out of Fort Worth before things finally started moving.
I went back the next year and traffic was still awful… but much better than the year before.
I gave up driving 6 years ago and haven’t looked back. Taking the train is slower on average for sure, but so much better for my mental health. And as a plus side, I’ve been reading a lot more too, with that time on the train!
I thought traffic was bad where I live… until we went to Atlanta for a week, holy shit
at least here we don’t have emergency vehicles getting stuck in traffic with their lights and sirens going
I was driving from Siphon to the ruins of Bandeau Chmmar on an old Honda Dream. The road was pure mud instead of dirt and an hour and a half trip turned into 3 hours of falling into the mud at low speeds. Made it there completely spent, covered in mud and pissed. But it was worth it. The way back was a bit better as things dried up.
Approximately 6 years ago I was driving back from the lake, late Sunday afternoon. The lake is in one province and we live in another. Turns out there was a fatal crash on the highway and everything was being detoured. What would normally be a 20 minute drive to the border ended up being 2 hours. And there was no detour you could take because one road literally connects eastern Canada to western Canada. After we crossed the border we were detoured north, and what is usually a 2 hour drive total to get home ended up being 6 hours.
I totally feel this. Yesterday we took the interstates to get home rather than the backroads. Whoops. Apparently about a half mile in front of us some Harley rider with no real gear on decided to wipe out. Helicopters, ambulances, cops, etc and the whole interstate shut down. People standing outside chatting, walking up and down the road, drinking, smoking, etc. It was nuts. Not as bad as Dave’s, but wow.
My worst one was self-inflicted. It was the last few days of a summer research internship, I had a poster to take home, it was raining hard after a week of rain, and I had driven to work. So I chose to drive home instead of taking the train. Huge mistake. All of the roads were flooding badly, especially the highways, but I knew a bunch of the regular roads would be high enough to be safe. I was right, but everyone was forced onto those roads, plus even they were flooding. It took 3.5 hours with water occasionally reaching my feet in the Hyundai accent I was driving, but I made it home. The most frustrating bit was when I finally reached blocks from my house but it was hard getting through due to all the trees and branches downed by a microburst. That was my dumbest, most dangerous, and most frustrating driving experience. I should have left the stupid poster at work and taken the train.