# Worst highway jam you've ever been through - for reasons other than weather and accidents.



## TohrAlkimista (Dec 18, 2006)

Driving along the A7 Milan - Genoa motorway, I experienced something like taking 2 hours for 2 km road.

A huge accident involving a track transporting wood and another truck carrying pieces of pottery, more or less at Serravalle.

One truck had a downfall of blocks of ceramics, that hit the other truck on the lateral side, since the other driver noticed something wrong with the truck in front of him and tried to move on the right along the emergency lane.

A wonderful show, with the motorway becoming suddenly red and pieces of wood everywhere. 

Then the A7 was completely blocked.
People turned their cars off and started to go around, some of them even crossed the guardrail to go to the nearest Autogrill.
People sunbathing, playing football...


----------



## CNGL (Jun 10, 2010)

CNGL said:


> Last year on C-14 road we went into slow traffic all the way from Reus to Montblanc (Junction with N-240). We took about a hour to go 20 km, despite that between Reus and Alcover it's an expressway.


No, I've been on a worst traffic jam. Back in 2007, on then A-23 near Saragossa (Now A-23 has been realigned and part of the section I went jammed has been renumbered back to N-330) we took about a hour to go 3 kilometers. The reason is that they were repaving and went from 2 lanes to only one.


----------



## Jonesy55 (Jul 30, 2004)

I've been stuck in a couple of terrible jams in France, once 20 years ago on the way from Orleans to Reims just south of Paris, can't remember which road, it wasn't a motorway, 4 hours moving at an average of 5km/h

Another time I got trapped in traffic on the ile d'oleron for about 3 hours.


----------



## g.spinoza (Jul 21, 2010)

Worst jam I've ever been in was this winter, coming back to Italy from holidays in Munich... It was January 2nd, and the traffic jam was basically uninterrupted between A8-A93 junction in Germany near Rosenheim and Trento, in Italy. More or less 300km in queue. Instead of the usual 5 hours form Munich to Bologna it took more than 11 hours...


----------



## bogdymol (Feb 4, 2010)

Yesterday evening was a traffic jam on Kecskemet bypass due to the International Air and Military Show in Hungary. But at least the police made all it's best to keep the traffic flowing.


----------



## Verso (Jun 5, 2006)

One of my worst traffic jams was also on 11th August 1999, on the day of the total solar eclipse. It was visible in a tiny corner of NE Slovenia, which means tens of thousands of Slovenes went there that day (me included). It was basically a jam for the last 80 km. We needed some 6 hours to get there.


----------



## ChrisZwolle (May 7, 2006)

So you've missed it? 

I was present at the 1999 solar eclipse too, in Landsberg am Lech, Germany.


----------



## Jonesy55 (Jul 30, 2004)

Me too, in the suburbs to the east of Paris!


----------



## g.spinoza (Jul 21, 2010)

^^ I went to Munich to watch the eclipse, after an epic train trip Ancona-Bologna-Brenner-Munich...


----------



## ChrisZwolle (May 7, 2006)

I remember it vividly, we were driving through the rain all the time, it was pouring down, and it was cloudless for just the time around the eclipse, talk about luck.


----------



## g.spinoza (Jul 21, 2010)

^^
That's my recall also of the eclipse: cloudless for just the time of the event  How far is Landsberg from Munich anyway?
I also remember trying to take pictures of the eclipse (I took a full equipment), but unfortunately the film malfunctioned and it was not loaded by the camera....


----------



## ChrisZwolle (May 7, 2006)

Landsberg is some 50 kilometers west of München. We were at vacation near Imst, Austria at the time and decided to drive north to experience the eclipse. It was one of the coolest things I have ever seen.


----------



## Verso (Jun 5, 2006)

ChrisZwolle said:


> So you've missed it?


No no, we departed early enough; we didn't wanna miss such an occurence. Oh, it's exactly 11 years since the eclipse.


----------



## CNGL (Jun 10, 2010)

Yep, and I saw a partial eclipse then. I saw two more (consecutive!) eclipses, one of them had the ring zone going through Spain  (In 2005)


----------



## volodaaaa (Apr 9, 2013)

The worst traffic jam I have ever been was in 2007 on SRB-H border when I was getting back from the holiday. The arrival to congestion was at 00:30 AM in night near Subotica and I left the border crossing at about 9:00 AM. It was definitely annoying since I have to be awake. If I had fallen asleep, every driver would have overtaken me. I also didn't know how to decide, whether should I have let my engine running or should I have started it before moving and then turned it off.


----------



## vitacit (Feb 8, 2008)

i went from eastern slovakia with my friends from astronomy club down to szeged, hungary to see eclipse. what the great experience it was !



Verso said:


> One of my worst traffic jams was also on 11th August 1999, on the day of the total solar eclipse. It was visible in a tiny corner of NE Slovenia, which means tens of thousands of Slovenes went there that day (me included). It was basically a jam for the last 80 km. We needed some 6 hours to get there.


----------



## Aphelion (May 29, 2010)

In the summer of 2005 I was in a traffic jam on the A1 at Hamburg due to roadworks. The delay was 4 hours and outside temperatures were 30 degrees Celsius or more.


----------



## JB1981 (May 16, 2008)

My worst idea ever must have been to visit London (hotel just a couple of blocks from Oxford Street) by car. Took more than two hours to get from the M25/M20 interchange to the hotel. Should have parked at a train station somewhere on the outskirts of town instead.

Second place for Paris at evening rush hour. This time I decided to be adventurous and drove from Pte de Italie to Pte de la Chapelle right through the center of town instead of taking the overcrowded Boulevard Périphérique. Still took quite some time but at least I had some sightseeing to do. Probably should have taken the A86 or A/N104 instead.

Third place is for Hamburg, trying to take the Elbe tunnel at afternoon peak hour on the first day of some spring holiday for most of northern Germany. Not much of an alternative here.

Fourth place is shared by Brussels (trying to deliver a package at morning rush hour) and Prague (arriving on friday afternoon for a weekend).


----------



## NordikNerd (Feb 5, 2011)

When I drove a taxi in Stockholm in the 90's and there was an event taking place. I had a 3km drive from Östermalm to Gamla Stan and it took an hour. We had a maximum fare during that time, so the customer didn't have to worry, because the meter stopped. I lost money though.








The worst jam I experienced this year, was on the E4 northbound at Jönköping. It was a total stop and people walked out of their cars on the motorway. The reason was asphalting going on.


----------



## Peines (Aug 13, 2011)

Me also experienced the worst jam this year (may 2013), in Albacete, on the A-31 Motorway going from Alicante to Madrid.

I remember that it started at the exit 91 and I leave the road at the exit 41 because i got mad.

The first 10kms were completed in 1h and 15' and the other 40 in a 1h. 2h 15' of jam. I was fun because we made the lunch, a karaoke and algo get tanned inside the car. :nuts:


----------



## Blackraven (Jan 19, 2006)

First vacation in America:

I got the colds and the flu when we were there (it was raining when we visited our cousin in Berkeley University; didn't have enough umbrellas).

So I was sick for a long time.

Now:
Drive from Disneyland in Anaheim (South California) to Las Vegas, Nevada = 6 hours

I gotta a headache and was really nauseating.

So damn, 6 hours of my head hurting all the way to Nevada.


----------



## Exethalion (Dec 23, 2008)

Me, my dad and his work colleague stuck on the M4 from Cardiff to Bristol in the Winter of 2011, very heavy snow made a 1 hour journey last about 8 hours. We were lucky to stop at Newport in the colleague's house where his wife made us a Roast Dinner.


----------



## sirfreelancealot (Jul 26, 2010)

For me,being stuck on what was the southbound A74, 8 miles north of Lockerbie, Scotland on Jan 3rd 1989, a couple of weeks after the Lockerbie air disaster resulted in a huge crater that took out the southbound carriageway and several houses.

The road was repaired then subsequently replaced with the A74(M) when it was upgraded to motorway.


----------



## Surel (May 5, 2010)

200 kms on German A2 from Hanover to Berlin during the winter holiday.


----------



## AsHalt (Nov 8, 2013)

If this tread is still alive, here's mine. 
It was the chinese new year, going on the "road trip" to my gramps at Malaysia's North South E'way <E1> 
When just outside of Kuala Lumpur, a jam happened. And turns out to be some event at some R&R stop just outside of the Capital that caused the jam. A jam from the E6 to the R&R stop....


----------



## bogdymol (Feb 4, 2010)

About 3 years ago I traveled to Budapest to visit the Christmas market, just a few days before Christmas. 

At the return trip I noticed a lot of cars registered in Italy, Spain, France & Germany on the M5 motorway in Hungary, between Budapest and Szeged. They were all Romanians working abroad that were returning home to spend Christmas with their families. At the interchange between M5 and M43 motorways the traffic stopped completely on the motorway because of too many cars wanting to take that exit. After the queue went moving again, we did the entire Szeged - Romanian border trip (63 km) in second gear (and few times also in third gear). The congestion was caused by the border controls, that, although done on 4 or 5 lanes and at high speed, they were not enough for that number of cars.


----------



## OulaL (May 2, 2012)

The jams in Heinola on Finnish road 5 were notorious prior to 1993. The town itself had a population with a little over 10000, but it was an important "gate to the lakeland"; situated by a lake itself, the only bridge across was in the town centre. Road 5 is the primary route connecting Mikkeli and Kuopio with Helsinki.

On a summer weekend, with lots of people driving from Helsinki area to their cottages in the lakeland, it could have taken 2 hours for a 10 km ride through Heinola.

In 1993 the bypass was completed through the town itself (including the longest motorway bridge in Finland), and 1996 to Lusi were the road splits towards Jyväskylä (today's 4) and Mikkeli (5), so eliminating the jams for most part.


----------



## Innsertnamehere (Jun 8, 2010)

worst or most agonizing? 

Worst as in slowest moving is the 404 in Toronto just north of the 401 on any given rush hour day. its 4+1 HOV, but handles over 300,000 AADT. Yep, that is pretty damn jammed at rush hour. Your lucky to average 5-10km/h on that stretch. tends to clear up fairly well mid day though.

The most frustrating is the 400 coming from Barrie southbound on a sunday evening in the summer. Everyone is coming back from cottage country (cabin on a lake), and there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of vehicles squishing their way onto a 3 lane motorway. Its even worse because there are no rural road alternatives for a significant stretch, and only gets worse on long weekends. it often takes 2+ hours to do 75km.


----------



## Neverworld (Sep 4, 2011)

My worst not in time but in feeling was returning from Barcelona to the French border (we had an apartment near Perpignan). It was 2am and approaching the French border from Spain the road rises quite a bit. We were stuck in traffic there for about an hour I think. At night, 25-30 degrees and in an old car without airconditioning. To make it worse, we were close to overcooking so we had to use the heating at full capacity to help the cooling system (there were actually a lot of cars, also new ones, at the side of the road cooling down, luckily we just managed to avoid that). It was hot and it was stop-go traffic uphill, so basically I had to hill-proof start every 20 seconds. That gets tiring very quickly and once I forgot I was still in neutral when releasing the handbrake, causing me to roll backwards 5 meter or so 

Anyway, we arrived at the border, it turned out Schengen had taken a day off. Borderguards were present, only one lane was open. The moment we passed they opened a second lane and our friends who were 15 minutes behind us reported that at that moment traffic started flowing again :nuts:


----------



## g.spinoza (Jul 21, 2010)

Sometimes it's hard to tell a jam due to traffic to one due to accidents. When you arrive at the source of the jam, vehicles can already have been removes so you wonder what really happened.

Three situations I've been in:

1- Italy, SR450 Peschiera del Garda-Affi, one summer sunday early afternoon. I was still living in Germany, spent my weekend in Brescia with my gf, and was headed back to Munich. I also had to stop in Rovereto and pick up a friend who lived in Munich too. About 3 km before the end of the expressway (used by the majority of those coming from Milan towards the Brenner in lieu of the much longer all-motorway Verona junction), we came to a complete standstill and stayed blocked for more than an hour. I guess it was due to the huge amount of people trying to get back to A22, using the much-less-than-adequate junction SR450-A22 by means of two separate roundabouts.

2- Italy summer sunday afternoon, circa 2009, driving A14 from Pescara to Bologna and then Brescia, the Ancona-Bologna section, circa 200 km, took us more than 6 hours. Never knew what happened there, but again I guess it was just traffic around Bologna.

3- Germany, friday late evening, winter 2010. Headed from Munich to Bologna to spend the weekend, we were caught in a snowstorm on the A8 near Holzkirchen. Again, hours of standstill due to two trucks which slipped in the snow and crashed. Three lanes were reduced to one, and voila.


----------



## riiga (Nov 2, 2009)

Going to Arlanda (Stockholm airport) back in 2005 to fly to Crete on holiday we managed to pick the departure date the day before Midsummer, and had to sit through an hour and a half of queues on the E4 in this area. Apart from that I haven't really been in any major traffic jams.


----------



## Exethalion (Dec 23, 2008)

Being stuck on the 405 from LAX to Palmdale directly after a transatlantic flight was not fun, especially when we got to the part where 5-6 lanes became 1 at the Sepulveda pass.


----------



## JimInJersey (Jul 24, 2010)

I've sat in jams on the Schuylkill Expressway west of Philadelphia numerous times, some for 3+hours, bad weather and good, night and day. There's no place to get off the road in many situations, exits are several miles apart, and there's no crossing of the median. Widened in the 80s, it used to be two lanes scrunched in between rocky hillside and Schuylkill River. A car breakdown in Conshohocken could back traffic up all the way to King of Prussia. Gaper blocks were often just as bad. In the early 1970s, I had to make a trip to center city Philly with business receipts about three times a week from about 30 miles west of town. One winter night after a slight warm up the fog settled in when it got cold, and traffic had to crawl along watching the white stripe at the shoulder to see. It was the densest fog I'd ever seen. Took me 7 hours to drive 32 miles home after the drop off.


----------



## Natomasken (Apr 25, 2008)

The one I remember the most was in 2011 in Belgium. I was going northbound on the A26 towards Liege when there were roadworks that narrowed 2 lanes to 1, then onto the shoulder. Traffic was at a standstill, barely moving for about an hour. I had a Belgium map so I thought I'd see if there was an alternate route. There was, so I figured out what directions I needed to follow and got off at the next exit. Traffic moved well along the alternate route, and when I crossed over the motorway again, I checked to make sure the traffic wasn't still backed up. It wasn't so I got back on. I was feeling very clever until I came across another backup. Oh, no, not another roadworks! Then I realized things were looking familiar. I checked the map and realized I'd misread the map, and had missed a turn, and had gone south instead of north! Not feeling quite so clever anymore, I endured going through that same jam twice instead of just once. (and of course, it turned out the traffic eased up just past where I'd exited the first time). It was a while before I got over the embarrassment and was able to tell that story!


----------



## BriedisUnIzlietne (Dec 16, 2012)

The worst that I have been in was in Latvia (because abroad I usually use public transport) on the A1 and then A2 just before entering the capital city of Rīga. The A2 is quite interesting piece of road as it combines the traffic flows of A1, A2 and A3 and is one of only 2 roads in total leading into the city from the north east and the other one is a regular 1x2. And there are two railway lines with quite a poor service. So the A2 serves as the main entrance in Rīga for 21 000 sq. km or 1/3 of the country's total land area. It is 2x3 between the two last junctions in the city but outside it is 2x2. The 2km from the border of the city to the first important junction with the A1 is sort of a bottleneck already. If something out of the ordinary happens, there are (for our country) massive traffic jams.

Almost half of the population lives in the capital but it is very popular to visit the relatives in the countryside during the weekends. On Friday there is a massive traffic flow out of the city and on Sundays - in to the city. So you would think then that last year, when resurfacing the A2, the workers would have thought of that. But no - they decided to close the outbound lane on Friday which made a traffic jam from early midday to midnight. And - the one which I experienced - they closed the inbound lane on Sunday. So the result was a 12 km jam on the A1 and A2. The flow was so slow that on a parallel local road I got to overtake a Porsche.

I find it weird that after the resurfacing they didn't convert the hard shoulders into 3rd lane as we don't have the money to build the bypass yet.


----------



## Autoputevi kao hobi (Jan 8, 2014)

The worst traffic jam where i have been was in 2013 on "Euzoni" border crossing where i have been waiting 2,5 hours to enter in Greece.The reasson for that much long waiting were lazy custom officers.


----------



## 865335 (May 30, 2010)

New Orleans, 2010, Tuesday after the Saints won the Superbowl...

Traffic was at a stand still all around downtown...freeways and streets...

Result of the victory parade... :banana:


----------



## ukraroad (Jul 18, 2015)

My worst traffic jam was on the border at Krakovets. Dunno whether it can be a only a queue or a traffic jam, too. Well, I stayed there for 20 hours waiting to be checked by the border guard.
If to come to a definite traffic jam - 4.5 hours at M05 from Kyiv towards Odessa on Feb 20, 2014, when there was a massive flee from Kyiv because of Maidan on fire, complicated by the reconstruction works on M05(at that time suspended)


----------



## Xusein (Sep 27, 2005)

I posted in this thread over 6 years ago. 

I think the worst traffic I ever experienced since then was on I-95 in NJ right before the GW bridge on a Sunday evening. It literally took 2 hours to move less than 10 miles. Very surreal.


----------



## Festin (May 21, 2010)

Some weeks ago I managed to get stuck at the motorway outside Bratizlava in the northern direction for a little more than an hour. Not sure how long the stretch was but we were not moving. I was on the left lane and saw many cars taking the emergency lane until the first exit to get out of the motorway and then get back in at the entrance further on. 
But did not have my navi on at that time so was not sure how much further that was and while thinking on it I lost my window since a truck move up to my right and blocked my exit. After that it was just to wait.


I think I had to wait almost 4 hourse some years ago some km south of Budapest in the northern direction, but cant remember if it was connected with closed roads near the then on going construction for the Budapest bypass.


----------

