I’ve been driving the same route to work for about two years, finishing with a transfer from one freeway to another and then to the first exit. The transition ramp is a cloverleaf up onto a bridge. Aside from an incident in which I was nearly clipped by a maniac in a Mercedes who insisted on climbing into my trunk on the off-ramp and zoomed past me the moment it reached the second freeway, I’ve never encountered anything worse than merging traffic.
In the past month I’ve seen three accidents—or, more precisely, one accident and two aftermaths.
First was an SUV that I watched slowly make a U-turn and crash into the center divider. (I have no idea how much control the driver had over the car at the time, but I swear I saw the wheel fall off when it hit.) Then last week there was the aftermath of a multi-car pileup on the side of the road. With the rain yesterday, I deliberately avoided the ramp and took the previous exit and surface streets. I was driving on automatic pilot today, so I took the ramp, and there was a car on the right shoulder and another SUV parked backwards, its right front wheel crunched into the center divider—in almost exactly the same spot as the one I saw a month ago.
Edit: I just wasted 10 minutes to bring you this *ahem* high-tech diagram:
Yuck. Two SUVs in the same spot, huh? They should post a sign, “Your center of gravity must be this low to use the ramp.”
Really. I think they must come up the ramp, get off-balance, and just list off to the left or something.
I just added a silly diagram to make it clearer where things were. (Hey, I do web development, of course I have graphics programs available at work! Drawing skills, on the other hand…)