Ohio roads suck!

[Wcross]

I just drove accross Ohio twice this week- the interstate is the WORST I have ever experienced. The trucks are limited to 55mph which forces all the other traffic to use the passing lane. I admit I break the limit on a regular basis, I try to keep it 10mph over the limit. It is all but impossible to do that in Ohio. It seems as if nobody will return to the proper lane after passing a truck. I hereby boycott Ohio- I will never enter the state again!

[johnnie]

1. Thanks..

We do that on purpose here. It keeps people away. If we see plates of a different state, we all slow down to piss them off. When visitors aren't around we drive fast.

[Wcross]

4. Its working!

Seems like every Ohio plate I saw was in the left lane and didn't want to move over.

[Droopy]

2. As a trucker based in Ohio, I couldn't agree with you more

We've been trying to get the speed limit raised for big trucks for a long time. It's very frustrating to be limited to 55. And as you know it also impeeds traffic. Where it's worse is around major metropolitan areas where you can't go with the flow with the traffic. To top it all off, the Ohio state patrol is very strict with enforcing the speed limit for trucks, so we can't get away with anything.

[Philostopher]

6. Another Ohio county reports in.

I drive the same roads you do -- I agree with you about SW Ohio. It's some of the worst interstate I'm ever on, mostly because of the dynamic between local auto traffic and semis.

I've been on the interstates in other parts of the country where the trucks aren't limited on speed, and they don't get clogged up the same way Ohio interstates do. I mean, there are other problems -- but between the bi-level speed limits and people just not having much sense about the physics of driving something that size (they act like they think a semi can be whipped around and accelerated/braked like a VW bug), it is more difficult to drive here than some other places. I've lived and driven here in Ohio most of my driving life, and I can certainly understand why the traffic here is annoying, both for car traffic from other parts of the country and (especially) for long-haul truckers.

I dread having to drive I-70, especially. I've been on I-70 from eastern Ohio all the way out to Kansas City, and I can testify -- the worst of it is through Ohio, and the biggest annoyance is passenger car drivers, not the road itself, unless you count the fact that I-70 is four lanes through most of Ohio. At least on I-75, there are three lanes each way.

People in cars are more disrespectful to the truckers here than a lot of other places, too -- they'll buzz trucks, cut them off, change lanes without signaling, 'draft' trucks (staying in the air wake behind a truck where the trucker can't see them, utilizing the downdraft off the back of the trailer to cut their own mileage), and ride in the trucker's blind spot. I don't even know if 'drafting' works, but I do know it affects the aerodynamics of the truck itself and makes it difficult to drive, and also puts you in the trucker's blind spot.

There was a really bad accident at Route 68 and 70 on Friday that had the route closed for over two hours. Somebody in a car coming up off a merge ramp cut off a trucker, who jacknifed the truck and was rear-ended by a third vehicle. The picture in the paper made it look worse than it was -- the cab of the truck was half off an overpass, and apparently hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel spilled down on the road below. Surprisingly, there were no fatalities -- the trucker managed not to hit the car coming up off the ramp that cut him off -- but it was quite a mess, apparently.

People here blame a lot of this stuff on the way the truckers drive, but to some degree, they are just wrong. I've driven other interstates where there's a lot of semi traffic, and I can tell you -- the semi drivers aren't nasty out west, where people don't treat them as an inconvenience or someone to actively annoy on the highway.

[Nikia]

3. Not really that bad

The trucks would probably go slower anyway too as they are fined at a much higher rate in Ohio for breaking the speed limit. The roads are relatively smooth though. In Wisonsin, the interstate is not really of interstate quality, yet we Wisconsites pay high taxes to support them. As far as volume, drive in the Chicago area if you want to see bad.

[rhino47]

5. Then come to Pennslyvania .

They don`t call us the Pothole state for nothing.

[xJlM]

7. You oughta see Louisiana

The worst possible roads, as far as repair and maintainence goes. Oh, I'll admit the roads in the area of Ohio I'm in really suffer in the winter time, since the county is too cheap to take care of the snow. The interstate itself may stay clear, but they don't plow or salt the exit ramps (where you're bound to be accelerating or braking). Federal taxes, state taxes, city taxes, and the state is constantly crying poor. What the hell do they do with that money?

[DivinBreuvage]

8. Too too true... but you forgot the WORST thing

The FREAKING MORON DRIVERS (I exclude myself, of course).

I live in Northeast Ohio and I'm not sure there's been a single year since I've been driving that some portion of I-76, I-77, 224, or another stretch of road I usually travel hasn't been torn up for road construction. Sometimes I swear they tear sections up just to get a claim for more federal highway money. There have also been several cases where they've had to redo the same stretch of road twice in two years because the contractors screwed it up the first time around.

The thing that gets me the absolute hottest (and I don't mean in a come-cuddle-darling purring kind of way) is being parked in traffic for forty-five minutes so people can rubberneck an accident on the shoulder of the road -- or worse yet on the OTHER SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY -- that is not obstructing traffic at all.

Francoise