Worst metro-area traffic

i think you've got 1 and 2 right there.

 

The Holland Tunnel is clusterfuck central, especially on the Jersey side with the construction project that is supposed to last something like six or seven years. Good grief.

 

The commute in DC is miserable enough that the transit rail system is overloaded. They're nowhere close to keeping pace with demand.

Does that qualify it for the list? People are just as pissed taking Metro as they would be driving...

 

Dallas is orgasmically bad.

Never been back east, but I can only imagine what DC/NY is like.

 

You may have a point. I was talking with some military folks and they all apparently cannot stand being posted to the Pentagon -- mostly because of the traffic.

 

Can anything actually be orgasmically bad?

Good or great maybe, but I don't think bad can work.

 

Toronto traffic - both highway and city - may be horrific, but as a guy who doesn't drive, I'd have to say that the public transit, both TTC and GO, is pretty good compared to many places.

 

The Cross Bronx asks, "What about me?"

 

I hate driving on 495 so much that I'm even reluctant to do so on days when it's normally supposed to be dead. After I got my license, I found out my folks (both of whom have been driving for at least 35 years) avoid it too.

Some roads are just hell no matter how you look at it.

 

I was working the Seattle-Green Bay game last year when the snowstorm hit. Took me 3 hours to go 20 miles to get home after the game, at 11 p.m. It took some of photographers I work with 5 hours to go 30 miles.

2 1/2 inches of snow in Seattle cause people to abandon cars and cancel school. It's ridiculous.

And for as bad as the traffic in Seattle and San Francisco is, I've never experienced anything like the 91 in L.A. Driving that during rush hour with a 9-month-old last year was a joy.

 

Glad to see the NYC isn't at the top of this list. After living there most of my life and now living in Chicago, the traffic is much, much worse here. It's not even close. Plan about two hours to go food shopping at any time during the day cause that's how long it's going to take. Just atrocious. The highways are jammed at weird times (1 p.m. on a Monday afternoon?), main streets like Western and North Avenues are nightmares. Instead of serving as an alternative for the highway, they are just as bad. The reverse commute traffic sucks. Problem is the transit system is such a mess people pack the highways and streets. Thank God for all the bike lanes because, the times I've biked, you get around quicker. That shouldn't be in a major city.

 

Having made the commute from Philly to Richmond every other weekend for about a year several years ago (Mrs. Runaway Jim and I had a long-distance thing going on while she was finishing up at William & Mary), I can definitely put the Baltimore-DC-Fredericksburg-Richmond stretch of 95 ahead of NYC, where I've also driven a lot. Not sure if it beats LA -- my West Coast friends tell me it's not even close, so I'll defer to them -- but it's pretty freaking bad.

And the worst part is, I was making that twice-monthly commute about 10 years ago. We still get down that way a lot, and it seems like the same stretch of the DC beltway is STILL under construction. How long does it fucking take to fix a road?

And don't even get me started on the Mixing Bowl. We sat there for three hours with a screaming 1-year-old in the car while heading down to Williamsburg for Easter a few years back. I felt like driving the car at top speed into a concrete abutment, but we were sitting still.