One of the things Colorado is infamous for is its terrible highway interchanges. The most infamous of these would be the I-25 / I-70 interchange – lovingly called “The Mousetrap”.
They rebuilt the Mousetrap in the early 90’s, and it is better now – but it still punishes tourists who haven’t planned ahead.
Back in the 80’s I drove through the ‘old’ Mousetrap fairly often – it was one of those things where you had to be in the correct lane for where you wanted to go about two miles ahead of time… Unfortunately not everyone was a local and the whole interchange was basically someone playing marbles with cars for most of the day.
It was so bad that in the 70’s Denver installed an airport-style control tower at the interchange to coordinate police and tow trucks.

It’s “Orange Season” here in Colorado, which means the surface streets all tend to be one-lane traffic jams currently. So this week I’ve been trying my luck by driving up Parker Rd. to the Parker / I-225 interchange…
And it’s a bit of a shit-show every day…

See, thanks to Cherry Creek State Park, everyone in the above area needs to get to that one spot to get on I-225. And there are only two roads to do this; Parker Rd. and Hampden Ave.
So every morning it looks a bit like this:

The people coming in from the 2-lane Hampden entrance on the right have to cross four lanes to the left in about a half-mile to go south on I-225. Meanwhile the people coming in from Parker Road at the bottom need to merge right across the 2 lanes of Hampden people trying to go left to go north on I-225.
To complicate this, if you look closely between the Hampden ramp and I-225, there are a couple of exits for the commercial park to the north…
This is where, every day, someone with out of state plates will madly charge across several lanes of 50+ mph traffic to take that Vaughn Road exit…
Something like this:

This morning I was the lucky recipient of one of these out of state people cutting right a few inches in front of my bumper.
No turn signal and no hesitation – just yanked it right.
Apparently there’s a reason the hellcat has 15.7″ 6-pot Brembo brakes on it – and it’s to stop the 4400 pound monster before it kills some idiot Californian in a beat up econobox.
I screeched to a halt, the cars behind me went three different directions, and I laid on the horn – to get flipped off for being in her way.
I probably need to just stick to the surface streets despite the cone-zones everywhere… There are fewer out-of-state people away from the highways.