Interstate 495

The capital beltway, a road that encircles Washington, D.C. passing through the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. It features four of the top 18 most congested interchanges in the US. Not a fun place to drive. (Unfortunately I have to on a semi-regular basis) At least two parts of this loop are under construction at all times, and they've just started a project to "fix" the interchange of I-95 at I-495 and I-395 known as the "Mixing Bowl". This construction will take approximately 12 years to complete, and when finished there will be one stretch of road that's 21 lanes wide. Is this progress?

Also the region of the worst drivers I have ever seen. I have been all over the country and driven in Asia (mindfuck), and I-495 is the most godawful place to put a car that I can imagine.

Example:
It rained today. Not hard, not a lot, just a short thunderstorm passing through. People pulled over for it. Not always all the way off the road, and not always where they was an actual shoulder.
On the highway I actually followed a minivan for five miles at 40 mph after it had stopped raining! The sun was shining. I was wearing my sunglasses. We were in the left most lane!

Slower traffic keep right!

I can't wait to move from here.

Forget the signs on the route markers which read "Inner Loop" and "Outer Loop", just in case you don't understand the concept.

Forget the fact that the traffic reporters never seem to report on the backup that you're in until you're a mile past the spot where it cleared out. (And forget the fact that half of the backups have no clear reason for existing.)

No, the real woes of the Capital Beltway can be summed up by something that a Washington Post columnist, Bob Levey, wrote about it a couple of years ago: he rated driving the Beltway a worse experience than Highway One in Vietnam while under mortar attack and dodging land mines. Of course, these days, you have a small but measurable chance of having to dodge small-arms fire...

I-495 is also the name of a highway in the NYC area. Known to locals as the Long Island Expressway or LIE, it can have some of the worst rush hour traffic in the area as all the Yuppies drive their SUVs out of Manhattan because they're just too good for the subway and/or the more comfortable Long Island Railroad. Expressway is really a misnomer here.

The Eisenhower Interstate System permits bypass and spur highway numbers to be recycled from state to state, so the most you can say about Interstate 495 without a further referrent is that it is supposedly a beltway forming a loop with Interstate 95 and allowing you to bypass a city or something else worth bypassing. By its very nature, 495 is going to be one of the more significant roads to people trying to go any distance in the vicinity of one, so each has its own distinct character that locals will merrily natter on about. There are five instances of the class Interstate 495 in six states at present, at least according to the inimitable Federal Highway System Route Log at http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/routefinder/ and the AARoads guide at http://www.aaroads.com/interstate/:

• 495 in Maine used to be the Maine Turnpike, connecting Portland and Gardiner via Lewiston over a distance of 50.47 miles. Legislation passed in 2001 and implemented in 2002 rerouted 95 over the Turnpike, made the old 95 part of 295, and reduced 495 to a small segment connecting the two other roads between Portland and Falmouth.
• My 495 is the outer circumferential highway around Boston—the inner loop being Route 128/Interstate 95 itself. The second-longest three-digit interstate in the system after Interstate 476, it runs from Newburyport down to Wareham by way of (for brevity, restricting it to places I have actually heard of before researching this node) Haverhill, Lawrence, Lowell, Hopkinton, Bridgewater and Franklin for a total of 121.56 miles.
• 495 in New York is the Long Island Expressway, "the backbone of Long Island". Political maneuvering gave it a three-digit interstate designation with an even first digit despite the fact that it is neither a loop nor connected directly to Interstate 95. Its 66.38 miles of asphalt connect Queens to, well, Long Island, by way of Long Island. Essentially a sop to the upwardly mobile sorts who can afford to drive into Manhattan but not to live in it; everyone else takes the train.
• Delaware's 495 connects Newport and Delaware while wisely skirting Wilmington. If Delaware actually existed, this highway would be 11.47 miles long, the shortest 495 of the bunch.
• The southernmost 495 is the world-famous Capital Beltway, straddling Maryland and Virginia over 31.41 miles in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to keep D.C. from leaking out and discomfiting the rest of us. Besides the occasional Stephenson-esque skirmish among rival spy agencies and less organized local gangs, it's mostly just a parking lot for bureaucrats, diplomats, and those who man the various industries built to manipulate, serve, and snoop on them.