Is there anything that can fill an otherwise pleasant, even-keeled person with rage faster than bad traffic and bad intersections?
It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Aroostook County or trying to get to Acadia National Park on Fourth of July weekend: there are places where the traffic and the driver behavior is so bad it’s maddening.
We want to know where in Maine those awful intersections are — where you always see traffic backed up, where your reflexes have to be lightning-fast in order to get anywhere and where it can, at times, feel outright dangerous.
This is a little bit subjective. The Maine Department of Transportation keeps records on the intersections and stretches of road with the most reported accidents — but they don’t keep records on those parts that make people want to tear their hair out. They may be one and the same, or totally different.
Some Bangor Daily News writers gave their least-favorites below, but we want to hear from you about what intersections in Maine drive you crazy. Leave a comment below, send an email to eburnham@bangordailynews.com, or fill out the Typeform at the bottom of this story. We’ll collect the worst offenders and write a follow-up story later.
Paul Bagnall, Presque Isle reporter: One notorious intersection in Presque Isle, off State Street on the way to Mapleton, is known locally as the “five fingers of death.” It’s hard to imagine one intersection having up to nine different stop lights, but once you pull up to the roulette wheel of the “five fingers of death” you can’t help but keep your head on a swivel to make your way through once your light turns green.
The Star City is currently looking into addressing this by working with the Maine Department of Transportation and TYLin International through the Village Planning Partnership.
Michael Shepherd, politics editor: I want to be polite to my colleagues, but their intersections are nothing compared with Cony Circle on the east side of Augusta. The three-lane, star-shaped mess of a rotary has five ways in and out. Businesses also encircle the perimeter.
This is not just my feeling. The low speeds keep it from being a death trap, yet 29 people have been injured there since 2021, according to state data. It had the most crashes of any site in Maine. (In second place was Memorial Circle, a connected rotary directly on the other side of the Kennebec River in this driving hellscape that is our capital city.)
To be clear, I do not fear the rotaries. Growing up in Hallowell, I was trained to drive on them. Maybe the brainpower required to do that was the reason why I failed my license test four times.
What I fear is any other driver on the Augusta rotaries. There are very clear signs telling you which lane to get in. Please follow them
Emily Burnham, audience engagement editor: The intersection of Stillwater Avenue, the Interstate 95 on and off ramps and the entrance to the Bangor Parkade shopping center has a confluence of factors that makes it incredibly irritating.
For starters, there’s a huge amount of traffic there. It’s a mix of people attempting to go to Kohl’s, Texas Roadhouse and the other businesses in the Parkade, people trying to get to other parts of the mall area and people clamoring to get in line at the constantly-busy Chick-fil-A.
Secondly, there are three lanes of traffic getting off the highway, but only one of those lanes is for people turning left onto Stillwater, or heading straight into the Parkade. That means that traffic backs up nearly onto the highway on busy weekends. If drivers aren’t paying attention, you can easily sit in traffic on the off ramp for three light cycles.
And, thirdly, people get very angry if said drivers don’t pay attention. You don’t often see road rage in Maine, but I have seen several instances of flashed middle fingers as people zone out on their phones, blissfully unaware that, oh yeah, it’s your turn to move.
Troy Bennett, photojournalist: At first glance, Morrill’s Corner in Portland appears to be an ordinary-but-ugly, four-way intersection. But Morrill’s bristles with several complications, making it one of Maine’s worst junctions.
Stevens and Allen avenues both branch off ultra-busy Forest Avenue (where urban planning went to die decades ago), but the two side streets don’t line up with each other. This creates an acre of dangerous no-man’s-land in the middle of the interchange. Railroad tracks run straight through the center of this paved wasteland, throwing the occasional freight trains into the mix.
Tiny, easy-to-miss Bishop Street empties into Morrill’s Corner, too, as do a bar, a gas station, another bar, a tattoo parlor and a carwash. The corner’s most unusual feature is a standalone McDonald’s with its own set of stop lights holding up traffic so folks can satisfy their Big Mac attack cravings.
Jules Walkup, midcoast reporter: Thankfully, this intersection doesn’t get nearly as much traffic as some of the bigger cities in Maine, but I’ve been living here for four months and I still get confused. At the intersection of Bath Road and Maine Street in downtown Brunswick, drivers turning left from Maine Street to Bath Road have the right-of-way over the people going straight on Maine Street. That’s because people going straight have a yield sign, but going left, you wouldn’t know that.
This leads to a constant game of chicken — should I go left because I have the right-of-way? Or should I make sure the person going straight sees the yield sign? They often don’t see it and barrel through the intersection. I don’t blame them — I didn’t know that yield sign was there for about a month either.
Bill Trotter, Hancock County reporter: Ellsworth, which gets all the traffic heading to and from Mount Desert Island, has two intersections that stand out.
On Bridge Hill, traffic coming and going onto Route 172/Surry Road has the right-of-way where that road intersects Route 1, so eastbound traffic on Route 1 has to stop. But during rush hour, eastbound traffic on Route 172 often is backed up from the intersection of Main, State and Water streets roughly 300 yards farther east, preventing eastbound drivers on Route 1 from merging in. Many of them instead cut over to Route 172 on Court Street, which makes the backup on Route 172 worse. It’s a problem.
Closer to Trenton, where High Street intersects the southern end of Myrick Street, vehicles that turn from either direction on High Street onto Myrick Street have to merge, but only northbound traffic has a yield sign. Some northbound vehicles wait until there are no southbound vehicles turning left onto Myrick Street (as if they have a stop sign) and other northbound vehicles don’t yield at all, even though some southbound vehicles turning onto Myrick Street want immediately to get in the right hand lane, where the northbound traffic comes in.
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