More to story behind stretch of I-71 called state’s worst

I picked a very questionable day to drive this part of purportedly harmful roadway time and again.

As The Dispatch reported final week, data-crunchers from a private finance know-how firm, MoneyGeek, checked out three years value of deadly crashes in Ohio and located that the 10 deaths that occurred on this stretch of I-71 between 11th and Morse Road were the most of any five-mile stretch in the state.

Anybody who usually drives this part of I-71 is aware of it may be difficult, even in superb climate and light-weight visitors. The freeway right here is commonly choked with backlogs introduced on by bottlenecks and a counterintuitive design that pits merging and exiting motorists in a crisscross battle of nerve and can.

Throw heavy rain into the combination, as on Wednesday, and I figured the driving might be fascinating, perhaps even revealing.

It was, too.

For an excellent chunk of the afternoon, I drove the stretch on a steady loop, exiting repeatedly at eleventh Avenue on the south and Morse Highway on the north, solely to merge proper again on the freeway and the loop over.

I narrated what I witnessed as I drove, and studying the stream-of-consciousness transcript on my telephone later was a reasonably good approximation of what driving I-71 in heavy rain can really feel like:

“Bombarded by a black Ford zigzagging by the lanes. Cop on the different facet along with his lights activated and any individual on the facet of the street … visitors lagging and rushing up, contracting and increasing like a caterpillar…”

And:

“Southbound by East North Broadway tractor-trailer virtually swerved into a bit of white automobile (as) the bottlenecking heart lane slows to 40 mph from 70 … drive previous the bumper components…”