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Comment by cfallin | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of this onramp to I-376 in Pittsburgh, where you have a stop sign (!) at the bottom of the onramp (!!), which then dumps you into an exit-only lane with a few hundred feet to merge left (!!!):

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4287854,-79.9328641,3a,75y,6...

I only took this ramp a handful of times before I learned to detour several miles to avoid it...

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There are many of these on the 110 in LA, just north of where this story takes place.

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.1032407,-118.1923538,3a,75y,...

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.1133129,-118.1766803,3a,75y,...

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.1114424,-118.1817898,3a,75y,...

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.1070639,-118.1870749,3a,75y,...

etc.

HAH! I took this exit twice last weekend! Really terrifying merge during Saturday afternoon traffic, but it was easy on Sunday morning (as I breathed a sigh of relief that I was leaving Pittsburgh and wouldn't have to do it again). Reminds me of a similar on-ramp onto the BQE in Brooklyn, which is equally if not more congested: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6899298,-73.9989999,3a,75y,1...

The exit off I-376 coming out from the tunnel is also really annoying -- exit, then left turn over a bridge, then you're back on the highway and need to exit, then pick the correct lane to head into Squirrel Hill, but it seems pretty arbitrary, and you may end up making a weird left turn anyway just to get "into" the neighborhood.

Pittsburgh driving taxes one's navigation skills on a good day, to put it mildly. Lived in Squirrel Hill for 8 years and got used to it but it's probably the most local-knowledge-dependent driving I've seen in the US. The five-way at the bottom of Murray at Forward is fun too (you want to go straight, but WHICH straight?).

When I first moved to Pgh, the street map reminded me of this Mario Kart 64 level: https://mariokart.fandom.com/wiki/Yoshi_Valley

It was fun but happy to be back on the west coast now :-) Also, glad I've never had to drive in NYC -- that looks tense!

This onramp became less stressful and more entertaining when I bought a sports car.

Grew up in Pittsburgh.

PA has the worst highway merging habits and I blame onramps like this. There's a number of them that are too short or have stop signs like this:

https://pghroads.tumblr.com/post/44161958475/the-stop-sign-o...

Ah-ha, found the spot in America where you can really benefit from driving a Tesla!

That's insane! My old F-150 L6 that I use for hauling project building materials probably couldn't get past 30MPH by the time that merge lane ended!

unless I'm missing some important context, the full stop seems like a really bad design choice here. where I live, that sort of entrance would just be marked "no merge area!". in dense traffic, people should probably stop, but in light traffic people could be going a lot faster; it really sucks merging into 65+ mph traffic from a full stop.

The hilly geography (and poor advanced planning) means you don't have room for your lane to continue ahead of you. It's an intensely short merge that would be dangerous to allow people to fly out into, given you don't have time to look and merge safely before your lane ends.

It's essentially:

1) Stop 2) Find a gap in traffic 3) Floor it

I suspect the whichever department is responsible for the intersection has some internal rules about where they put what kind of traffic signage and this merging area is too small for a proper merge with a yield sign so they just slapped a stop sign on it knowing full well that most drivers will treat it like a yield it in light traffic conditions.

Of course this causes problems when dutifully law abiding drivers from out of town follow the law to the letter and cause near misses or rear endings because they are behaving unexpectedly compared to normal traffic but that's not the problem of the people who put the sign there. Ignoring these kinds of edge cases and expecting someone else (often the courts) to sort it out on a case by case bases when it causes problems isn't exactly uncommon in government. It's like their version of an unanswered bug report from 2010 with a bunch of "hey I found this by googling and I have the same issue" comments below it.

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