Michael Barone

The Worst Intersections in the United States Are in New York, Chicago and LA

March 3, 2009 RSS Feed Print

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

What are America's 100 worst intersections? Tyler Cowen at www.marginalrevolution.com points me here. Almost all of them—87 out of 100—are in the extended New York, Chicago and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. Exceptions: San Francisco CA (nos. 2, 46, 49, 58, 64), New Haven CT (nos. 22, 51), Honolulu HI (no. 55), Austin TX (nos. 71, 74, 87, 92), Dallas TX (no. 93). After consulting my road atlas and my memory I find, with grim satisfaction, that I have driven through, around, under or over every single one of these 100 intersections. I note with special pleasure no. 100, which is the I-405 exit onto La Tijera Boulevard, a great exit for getting your rental car back to the lot in time for your plane out of LAX. I remember one time leaving the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard just east of La Cienaga, and barreling down La Cienaga, then to 405 and La Tijera, and getting to the rental car lot in just 23 minutes, in time to make my morning flight out of LAX. How many weeks (months?) of my life did I give up in that adrenalin rush to get to the airport in time?

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Tags:
traffic fatalities,
New York,
cars,
Los Angeles,
travel,
Chicago

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Ah, but you describe coming off the southbound 405 to La Tijera, and the list says the northbound exit is 100th worst. Me, I think the concentration of the list on these three metro areas points to its inadequacy. Surely there are interchanges in Boston, Philly, Atlanta that should have made the list. And there are even treacherous and often-congested interchanges in Minneapolis.

bellczar of MN 6:01PM March 05, 2009

I'm surprised not to see any DC-area interchanges on there. Maybe there would be if the Beltway "Mixing Bowl" in Northern Virginia hadn't been reconstructed.

It doesn't surprise me that one on the Cross Bronx Expressway is on top, with several others on that highway behind it. The one time I tried to drive on that, I bailed out after nearly an hour of nonmovement and cut through the Bronx streets, often under the elevated rail tracks. Robert Moses cut up neighborhoods and blasted through solid rock ridges for that?

Michael Karns of MD 1:09PM March 04, 2009

Michael Barone

Michael Barone

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Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications—including the Economist and the New York Times.

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