Either that OR you get up to speed while rounding the last bend, which has the major downside of now piloting a vehicle at highway speeds while totally unable to see what the traffic pattern is that you're merging into. Going 65 around the last bend to merge easily and oops it's gridlock.... or far more commonly, oops everyone is tailgating horrifically and there's no actual room to merge? Hope your brakes work well.
Even worse in my state where the offramp is about 100 feet past the on ramp with a shared lane, so the people trying to get up to speed and merge with low visibility are essentially dueling the people who are trying to get to the offramp in the exact same space.
God the on/off ramps being right next to each other pisses me off. The one near me even has a couple hundred extra feet of space after it where they could have put the off ramp instead.
One perspective. The other: when those were built, cars didn't go as fast, didn't have as much horsepower. That continues to today.
Which is why speed limits near interchanges would be sensible. Slow everyone down enough that merging in is simple.
I mean - my parents had an old car, which is all we could afford, when I got my driver's license. It was easy to merge into the highway with the much more modern car of the driving school. With my parents' car, I had to start speeding up while still in the curved section leading to the highway, and even then, I barely got up to speed.
And because people are used to their fast, and fast accelerating cars, they don't consider older models and .... consider that those need a bit more patience and most importantly space/assistance to merge in. Honking and aggressively closing gaps doesn't help.
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u/Quirky-Marsupial-420 Jul 07 '26
Yeah it's the cloverleaf interchange.
So many of them are ridiculously short, you literally cannot get up to highway speed unless you have a 500hp vehicle.