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I drive the same roads you do -- I agree with you about SW Ohio. It's some of the worst interstate I'm ever on, mostly because of the dynamic between local auto traffic and semis.
I've been on the interstates in other parts of the country where the trucks aren't limited on speed, and they don't get clogged up the same way Ohio interstates do. I mean, there are other problems -- but between the bi-level speed limits and people just not having much sense about the physics of driving something that size (they act like they think a semi can be whipped around and accelerated/braked like a VW bug), it is more difficult to drive here than some other places. I've lived and driven here in Ohio most of my driving life, and I can certainly understand why the traffic here is annoying, both for car traffic from other parts of the country and (especially) for long-haul truckers.
I dread having to drive I-70, especially. I've been on I-70 from eastern Ohio all the way out to Kansas City, and I can testify -- the worst of it is through Ohio, and the biggest annoyance is passenger car drivers, not the road itself, unless you count the fact that I-70 is four lanes through most of Ohio. At least on I-75, there are three lanes each way.
People in cars are more disrespectful to the truckers here than a lot of other places, too -- they'll buzz trucks, cut them off, change lanes without signaling, 'draft' trucks (staying in the air wake behind a truck where the trucker can't see them, utilizing the downdraft off the back of the trailer to cut their own mileage), and ride in the trucker's blind spot. I don't even know if 'drafting' works, but I do know it affects the aerodynamics of the truck itself and makes it difficult to drive, and also puts you in the trucker's blind spot.
There was a really bad accident at Route 68 and 70 on Friday that had the route closed for over two hours. Somebody in a car coming up off a merge ramp cut off a trucker, who jacknifed the truck and was rear-ended by a third vehicle. The picture in the paper made it look worse than it was -- the cab of the truck was half off an overpass, and apparently hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel spilled down on the road below. Surprisingly, there were no fatalities -- the trucker managed not to hit the car coming up off the ramp that cut him off -- but it was quite a mess, apparently.
People here blame a lot of this stuff on the way the truckers drive, but to some degree, they are just wrong. I've driven other interstates where there's a lot of semi traffic, and I can tell you -- the semi drivers aren't nasty out west, where people don't treat them as an inconvenience or someone to actively annoy on the highway.
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