Roads. I’ve been thinking about roads a lot lately. I’m not sure how that morphed into a search for the road with the most lanes, but that’s where it ended this evening.
San Diego, California, USA
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Lots of other people have wondered the same thing, apparently. That allowed me to cherry-pick various lists and collections for many of the better examples. The king of the Interstates appeared to be a stretch of I-5 near San Diego, California, between I-805 and California Highway 56. I counted 21 lanes, including through lanes, local lanes, and exit lanes. I would be more impressed if all of the lanes traveling in a single direction weren’t separated by a barrier. Then it would be a massive 10 or 11 lanes across that one could slalom amongst unfettered.
I’ve driven through here before. I think that anyone who’s experienced this stretch or any of the others mentioned elsewhere below in person deserves a special badge of honor for courage or maybe foolishness — definitely some kind of badge.
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
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Atlanta’s "Downtown Connector," a concurrency of Interstates 75 and 85 has many fewer lanes, a mere 15. Why would I feature that? Because these are pure, contiguous lanes without separation into feeder lanes, exit lanes, or local lanes. It’s one big mass of roadway in either direction without obstruction. I’ll note, since someone is bound to mention it, that the inside lanes are painted with white diamonds. Those are High-Occupancy Vehicle lanes, in this case HOV-2, restricting automobile traffic to those with two or more occupants to encourage carpooling. Nonetheless, no physical barrier separates the HOV lanes from the regular lanes. Presumably if a driver had a passenger or if someone was riding a motorcycle, or if someone simply wanted to take his or her chances with the law, every single lane would be accessible.
The Federal Highway Administration considers this Atlanta location to have the most lanes available in the United States. They don’t count extraneous factors that lead to larger numbers like the San Diego example. I guess it depends on one’s tolerance. Is it acceptable to count all of the lanes if they’re separated into distinct traffic streams, or must they all be accessible to every vehicle going in a common direction?
I’ve driven this one, too. Another badge? I need to collect them all up-front because I’ve not driven the others.
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
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Some may say Mississauga, I’ll say Greater Toronto Area, specifically within the vicinity of Toronto Pearson International Airport. This beastly little stretch of Highway 401, the MacDonald-Cartier Freeway just south of the airport, seems to have 20-ish lanes depending on how one counts them.
SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
A few miles further east on 401 with only 17 lanes, but you get the point.
This area includes a variety of different lane types. I can see express lanes in the middle, another set of lanes that are handling traffic arriving from or destined to other highways, and a couple of exit lanes.
Greater Manchester, England
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It’s not only the North Americans that can dream up these nightmarish occurrences. The United Kingdom seems proficient too. Manchester was mentioned frequently by people online so I took a closer look on Google Maps. I’m not sure I found the absolute best example there although I found a reasonably good one, with 17-ish lanes on the Manchester Ring Motorway. I’m not really happy with this example because of the obvious gaps between traffic streams (does the width of the separations matter?). Maybe someone can find a better one.
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
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There’s something for everybody on 12MC today. Australia gets in on the action with Sydney’s Warringah Freeway. I counted 18 or 19 lanes. It’s hard to tell. This freeway also includes lanes marked with red pavement, at least a couple of which were reserved for buses, which was a twist I hadn’t noticed on the other examples.
São Paulo, Brazil
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Finally, I turned my attention to South America. The best example I could find was in São Paulo, Brazil on the Vinte e Três de Maio (May 23rd Highway). The date refers to the beginning of the Paulista War (aka the Constitutionalist Revolution), an uprising sparked by the shooting of five student protestors on May 23, 1932. This marked São Paulo standing up for itself. It is memorialized today on various roads and civic structures including this one.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the Grateful Dead although they were indeed from California and noted for Truckin’. It is literally about trucks in California. Feel free to listen to Truckin’ in the background if that would make you happy though.
It all started out more grandiosely. I recalled a particularly awful drive on Virginia’s Interstate 81 last November where it seemed like every other vehicle on the highway was a truck. Some were driving with extreme aggression and well above the posted speed limit. The rest were poking along well below the limit. I grew increasingly aggravated as I slalomed between them.
That incident later inspired an online quest to find a highway with the highest percentage of trucks primarily so I could forever avoid it. That quest continues. I haven’t given up that search. Meanwhile I do have an answer for California. I found a great page from the California Department of Transportation. I was able to download a spreadsheet of annual average daily truck traffic in 2011, which I then sorted appropriately to determine all California state highways with more trucks than cars. It happens rarely. Only a small handful of places throughout the state met that standard. Imagine the nightmare of routes where more than half of all vehicles are trucks, not "seems like it" but genuinely so, consistently, day after day, forever.
Of course I plotted the offending locations. I found it fascinating that almost all of them happen near borders.
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I examined each area and I tried to determine what might account for an overabundance of truck traffic, paying particular attention to apparent clusters.
Calexico/El Centro
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The top spot went to Rt. 115 at its junction with Rt. 78 in Imperial County. Trucks composed an astounding 81.9% of recorded vehicle traffic passing this point in 2011. That is such an amazing statistical outlier — no other point in the California managed to crack even 60% — that I had to wonder if it might have been a typographical error. I checked the math and it seemed to work. Nearby, Route 98 at Cole Road in Calexico also scored high with 56.36% trucks.
All truck traffic crossing from Mexico into the United States along this particular stretch of the border uses the "Calexico East" Port of Entry. That might explain Route 98. I’m not sure it explains Rt. 115. It doesn’t seem to follow a logical path between the port of entry and the outside world. Farms and fields surround the junction. Maybe trucks address some sort of agricultural purpose here instead?
Los Angeles/Long Beach
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This one seemed more straightforward. The adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the two busiest container ports in the United States. Add their volume together and they handle three times the cargo of the next busiest port, New York/New Jersey.
Two spots nearby both hit 57.52% truck traffic, on Rt. 47 where it crosses the Commodore Heim Lift Bridge and shortly thereafter where Rts. 47 and 103 split. Notice their placement on the map above. They are practically equidistant between two very active ports. A massive volume of containers heads in-and-out at any given time and this route serves a good option. It’s a wonder truck percentages weren’t higher.
Maybe the brief stretch of Interstate 40 from Needles, California to the Arizona state line falls within this same cluster, even though it’s completely across the state? The highway provides a straight shot between the ports and several distant metropolitan areas including Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Amarillo and even Oklahoma City. The southeastern interior of California wouldn’t account for much local traffic, and containers originating in Asia would need to roll east in a steady stream to distant inland cities.
Bakersfield/McKittrick
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I was going to guess that truck traffic near Bakersfield might be serving agricultural needs until I drilled-down to the exact spot. The junction of Rts. 58 and 33 happens in McKittrick, which falls outside of the fertile San Joaquin Valley. The terrain looked rather rough and pretty much dug-up by human activity. Thank goodness for Wikipedia and the likely explanation:
The town is in the center of a large oil-producing region in western Kern County. Along State Route 33 to the south of the town is the Midway-Sunset Oil Field, the second-largest oil field in the contiguous United States; within the town itself, as well as to the west is the McKittrick Field; to the northwest is the huge Cymric Field; and along Highway 33 beyond Cymric is the large South Belridge Oil Field, run by Aera Energy LLC. East of McKittrick is Occidental Petroleum’s Elk Hills Field, formerly the U.S. Naval Petroleum Reserve.
I don’t know if every truck passing through here serves the oil industry, however it seems like a plausible reason for much of the 55.55% truck volume, absent further evidence.
National Forest
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Of all roads with greater than 50% truck traffic, only Route 161 in Siskiyou County fell outside of southern California. It’s about as far away from the others as possible. The anomaly recorded 55.25% truck traffic at the far northern extreme of the state. There might be an agricultural reason because of nearby farms. There might also be another reason, forestry: Winema National Forest, Fremont National Forest, Modoc National Forest, Shasta National Forest and Klamath National Forest are nearby as are areas accessible to commercial logging. Maybe the trucks are hauling logs?
The newspaper version of the Amazing Spider-Man today (February 5, 2013) has Peter Parker attached to the back of a moving van, hitching a ride to San Francisco . He’s recently left Las Vegas, and he’s just passed a road sign that reads "San Francisco 237 miles." Peter is very obviously riding along an Interstate Highway. Here is a link to the specific comic strip — for as long as it remains on-line.
Where is he?
First, the route:
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Now the location:
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And finally the Street View:
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He’s at approximately lat/long 35.650043,-119.678131, just north of the small town of Lost Hills, California, and about 42 miles (68 km) west-northwest of Bakersfield. Keep your eyes open. If you spot spider-man this evening somewhere along I-5, let me know.
