Central Indiana Interstates, highways, and surface streets are rife with intersections, exits, and general traffic management that make no sense. As one of many bad consequences I believe that Indiana drivers have evolved into some the worse in the country.
Exit five on I-69 is one the most poorly designed striped and signed interchanges that I have ever seen. Indiana highway engineers consistently fail to grasp and implement the concept of utilizing as much of the road capacity for as much distance as possible. They don't seem to know how to implement more than one-lane exit ramps. INDOT does not effectively manage merge points. This stretch of road has been under construction for about four of the last six years and they can't get it right. They keep adding lanes and then they fail to use the extra capacity.
The southbound traffic from both IN-37 and I-69 is funneled into a short bottleneck where the traffic is forced to criss-cross in a pathological manner with outlets to 116th Street and I-69 south. Where the road requires the most capacity, there's a single lane and two lanes where there's less traffic. Northbound is just as bad. The traffic and highway engineers INDOT force all of the 116th Street AND IN-37 traffic into a single lane and it allows through IN-69 full use of ALL FOUR lanes. They can easily reserve two lanes for the exit and direct the though traffic to the two left lanes.
The recent lane addition on the southbound ramp actually has made this exit more treacherous than before. The lane addition for northbound I-69 has not relieved any of the congestion because they have failed to sign and stripe it correctly. The exiting traffic backs up to 96th street and it encourages dangerous behaviors due to the ineptitude of the design.
This whole thing is a disaster and it is indicative of INDOT's ineptitude in all things. They ought to spend some time in Kentucky where the road striping and exits make for smooth traffic flows.
Traffic on IN-37 southbound and I-69 northbound always dangerously backs up into intersections one and two miles respectively in the upstream directions because they have failed to effectively use the lane capacity. read more