State of Columbus' Highways: 71/70 sucks.

So, if you've been keeping up with my blog, you know that I was involved in an accident on this trip, and if you haven't been keeping up, you now know about it. As it turns out, this particular spot is well known by the locals as an EXTREMELY DANGEROUS spot... infact, there is a CITY PLAN to change it. With this being the case.... how much signage or warnings were there about this? notta.

I point you to this:

CITY PLAN

and the local news

So, what does this mean? Well, one of the people in my seminar told me that she thought I should sue the city. At first I laughed about this, but you know what....

if getting rear ended in an auto accident can possibly be my fault, do you know who else's fault it can just as easily be? The fine city of Columbus, OH. They actually share quite a bit more fault in this matter then I do, although still not as much as the guy who hit me. if the insurance company somehow finds this to be any way connected to me, I might just look into this more. If this is a known dangerous place, the city should at the very least have signage, and in reality should have an officer there to keep traffic slowed down. Steps could have been, and should have been, taken.

Here are some photo's of the area taken by the wonderful google earth thing:




I was traveling from left to right on this picture.
It's hard to see here, but I'll explain the basic set up. There is an on ramp right before the river, on the otherside of the river that same onramp lane is also the exit to "fulton" which is apparently a very popular destination. The people coming from the major highway 71 enter the express way from that on ramp but must get over unless they wish to go to the fulton street exit. To add fun to this, traffic backs up from fulton onto the express way, so as was the case for while I was in my accident (which was on a SUNDAY, which is a LOW TRAFFIC DAY) the traffic was backed up from the fulton exit, all the way up the ramp, back to about half way between the bridge and and the fulton exit... about to where the train tracks are. I'll draw it on the next picture:




Soo.... this means that traffic exiting 71 has very little room to merge onto 70, and for those poor bastards like myself who actually want to get off the express way, we have a nightmare to get over. Luckily, as I said, it was a sunday, and traffic was light. I was able to get over without any problem. My problem was that the driver behind me was too busy to be watching the road ahead of him, let alone the traffic backed up way onto the expressway.


Here is the ramp:



Anyway, I need to get to my seminar. I'll stop my ranting for now.