M-14 & Barton Drive

When I went by it seems to be a SUV towing a trailer that had jackknifed or something similar. It took over 45 minutes to travel from M-14 and US-23 to the Main Street exit!

This series of intersections from M-14/US-23 through Main Street is so scary. I have passed numerous accidents in the year I have been driving through here daily, most seemed to have just happened!

Keep in mind… the Barton Drive exit, as it exists today, isn’t even supposed to be there according to the original freeway design. Just north of the current entrance/exit ramps are a set of footpaths that cross (if I remember correctly) under the freeway… THAT’s where the final interchange is supposed to go. I understand that building those ramps would shift the on/off freeway traffic three blocks to the north, and I’m sure it would be opposed by the folks in that neighborhood, but the danger level on the Barton Drive ramp as it’s built today just isn’t reasonable.

Check out the entrance to M-14 from Jackson sometime. When it’s busy or slippery, it’s white knuckle city.

There are any number of things on the Ann Arbor freeways that aren’t meant to be:

1. The Barton entrance/exit (which will never close as Barton Hills has too many influential residents!)
2. The lack of an entrance/exit at Nixon (yep, there is supposed to be one there!)
3. The inability to go from M-14W to I-94E, instead we dump rush hour traffic onto Maple Rd. and the masses flow to Jackson road to hop on I-94 (as this take less time than going around Ann Arbor)

Rod, I assumed you mean the 90 degree turn when entering I-94E from Jackson road? I used to drive this everyday and through nothing of it in my turbocharged car, then I drove my wife’s Focus and wondered which semi was going to run me over! Is is always fun to slide sideways on that entrance ramp in the winter…

BTW moving the Barton entrance 1/4 to the North won’t fix anything, on one side people would still enter on a hill and on the other people would be nearer the poorly designed US-23/M-14 merge where people merge from the left.

It would be nice if there was some Police enforcement of the speed limit through this section…

Not to mention the little dance you do to get on to Main coming from the west–get off at Barton, swing around under 14, get back on, cross the river and exit on to Main. But it’s either that or spend the best years of your life waiting at the light at Maple and Jackson.

Good point Rod, you would have thought improvements would have been made when all of the M-14 bridge work was done…