On my road trip to Oklahoma City from good ol' Los Angeles, I passed through Arizona and New Mexico to get there. There were some bad highways in between, but none of them compares to Oklahoma City in the level of frustration. There are so many things wrong with it that it's hard to know where to even start.
The first and foremost that annoys me is the fact that they place exits ramps more or less right in front of the on ramps. This has the bad side effect of severely congesting these areas and creating some dangerous driving maneuvers. When getting on the highway, particularly during peak times, the drivers getting off the highway won't make space for those getting on. This makes it so that you either end up driving right off the highway that you just got on, or come to a near stop just so that you can inch your way in and then change lanes again into one where cars are coming up behind you at 60+ mph.
This brings up the second point that's related with the bad driving experience in OKC... the drivers. Many drivers here seems to suffer from more road rage and impatience than those in LA. They will pass you on the right lane even when there is a left lane to pass on. They will start accelerating when they see the turn blinker on so that you can't change lanes and you force your way in, they now have to break hard and tailgate your ass. Come on! I turn on the signal and slip in behind a 65 mph car and they are coming up behind me at 75 mph. There's so much to list... Yes, they do this in LA too, but nowhere near as often as I encounter here.
Another annoying part about driving on the highways here is that they have random hills. The state is about as flat as any that I've seen, but when your driving, you come across constant hills. Honestly, could they not have made the land flat when they were creating the system? I suppose it wouldn't really annoy me if not for the fact that I drive a prius and see my mileage go down.
They have exits on the left side of the highway. Seriously. I remember trying to drive to a location and must have passed the place twice trying figure out where the exit was. Isn't that the normal method of driving? The right side is the slower side with all the exits and on ramps, so when you know that you have to get off in a couple of exits, you change lanes to the right side. Isn't that the norm?
Their merge lane sucks. It's really short so there isn't much time to change lanes which causes a lot of problems that I won't get into. It's regulated by their yield sign. That's all it is. It baffled me when I first came across it. Do you really need a yield sign to tell people not to turn in when there's a car coming up at 70 mph? Isn't this common sense?
I'll stop here for now... I just needed to get that off my chest.
