States with the best & worst rest areas?

[Flint1979]

I don't know about the worst but the best IMO is Ohio.

[skluth]

Last fall, I visited the SC Welcome Center on I-pretty nice welcome center with free official state maps (I'm a sucker for that)

YES!!!!! Every welcome center rest stop should have free official state maps when you reach the state. It may not mean as much anymore, but not every traveler buys annual editions of Rand McNally to supplement their phone GPS (and many older drivers still don't have a smart phone). It accelerated my map and geography obsession because I loved to collect free maps as a kid. It can be a promotional tool as I've seen several state governors advocate their state's business climate or spectacular scenery on the back cover.

They can also be tremendous educational tools. They can not only teach geography (especially if the highway info overlays some sort of relief or land use background), but state maps often includes important tourist and historical info, native flora and fauna, and fun state facts to ponder while sitting in the back seat.

[Scott5114]

Nevada can be incredibly sparse but a good chuck of their rest areas are located in very remote US Route segments in between long gaps in commercial services.  They basically are intended to do nothing more than function as a place take a quick whiz and/or deuce.

The shittiest (literally) rest area I've ever been to was the one off I-80 at the US 95 interchange between Fernley and Lovelock. There was no way that place had been cleaned in months if not years.

More recent reviews on Google mention clean bathrooms, but if Nevada waits a long time for maintenance then that's a problem.

I've had no experience with NV personally but CA ones are just alright. I find some of them near urban areas unnecessary (for example on I-5 in Camp Pendleton).

I think if I ever take the time to fill out a Google review of a rest stop, someone needs to sit me down and have a little talk.

Chris

If you're a passenger in a vehicle, you should have the 5 minutes it takes to make a review.

It's more whether that's a good use of the time, more than anything. Businesses respond to negative reviews because they can cause them to sell less product. Rest areas? If the rest area gets shit-talked enough on the Internet that people stop using it, the government can shut it down for lack of use and then they're off the hook for maintaining it!

If you have problems with the way a rest stop is being run, you'll have way better results spending the time to send an email to your state rep than you will posting to Google.

It's helpful to other travelers to review it, especially more recent ones.

Generally I don't take user-generated reviews very seriously, since most reviews are mindless positives, and the negative reviews tend to be from people who are bent out of shape because they wanted something unreasonable and didn't get what they wanted. Rarely do reviews offer an accurate idea of what you're getting into going into a transaction, unless there is some common, easily reproducible and disastrous problem.

It's common practice in marketing to try to get people to write reviews, because the vast majority of transactions are ho-hum not-great but not-incredible experiences. But when you get someone to force themselves to reflect back on the experience, there's a tendency to want to make it seem better than it was, both because human memory tends to play down negative experiences, and because people don't want to feel like they made a bad decision and thus feel like they got conned. So the actual experience of "I bought this vacuum and it does an okay job like every other vacuum, I guess" becomes "This is the greatest vacuum ever! Five stars!" when it's not really the greatest vacuum ever and from a rational point of view it's really more three stars.

[machias]

Having been in all 50 states, I can honestly say I don't have a way to rank all of the Rest Areas I've been to over the years, but I can mention the ones that stick out to me:

1. Illinois, always clean and comfortable.
2. Pennsylvania, hit or miss. Some are rebuilt and quite nice, others are quite old and feel a little sketchy
3. New York, some are just overkill since the second Cuomo went crazy with his tourism plan, while others are completely forgotten. I-81 Brewerton rest area, anyone?
4. Arkansas, I vividly remember in the pet area they mounted a fire hydrant for "city dogs" and a tree stump for "country dogs". Lots of picnic tables.
5. Alabama, one of them has a rocket!
6. Florida, always clean and nice, though I've only been to rest areas north of Tampa and Orlando
7. Arizona, very, very nice
8. Indiana, it seems I try to cross Indiana at night and every time the rest areas were PACKED with parked tractor-trailers.

[kphoger]

Generally I don't take user-generated reviews very seriously, since most reviews are mindless positives, and the negative reviews tend to be from people who are bent out of shape because they wanted something unreasonable and didn't get what they wanted. Rarely do reviews offer an accurate idea of what you're getting into going into a transaction, unless there is some common, easily reproducible and disastrous problem.

What I do to get an accurate view is a simple two-step process:

[1]  Search reviews by "lowest rating" first.  Read the top ten or so worst reviews, and determine if they're (a) "people who are bent out of shape because they wanted something unreasonable", (b) complaints about nothing more than the reservation or billing process, or (c) legitimate concerns to know about.

[2]  Search reviews by "newest" first.  Read the ten or so most recent reviews, and see if there's a trend of good or bad reviews.  Also check to see if management responds and, if so, in what way.

As for rest areas, my goal simply to let people know what to expect.  So I won't be mentioning cleanliness, their having run out of toilet paper, or anything else that changes from day to day.  Rather, I'll mention if there are picnic tables, decent bathrooms, adequate parking, etc.

And, if the online review pool is polluted by worthless reviews, then the best way to counteract that is to post valuable ones.

[ethanhopkin14]

Generally I don't take user-generated reviews very seriously, since most reviews are mindless positives, and the negative reviews tend to be from people who are bent out of shape because they wanted something unreasonable and didn't get what they wanted. Rarely do reviews offer an accurate idea of what you're getting into going into a transaction, unless there is some common, easily reproducible and disastrous problem.

What I do to get an accurate view is a simple two-step process:

[1]  Search reviews by "lowest rating" first.  Read the top ten or so worst reviews, and determine if they're (a) "people who are bent out of shape because they wanted something unreasonable", (b) complaints about nothing more than the reservation or billing process, or (c) legitimate concerns to know about.

[2]  Search reviews by "newest" first.  Read the ten or so most recent reviews, and see if there's a trend of good or bad reviews.  Also check to see if management responds and, if so, in what way.

As for rest areas, my goal simply to let people know what to expect.  So I won't be mentioning cleanliness, their having run out of toilet paper, or anything else that changes from day to day.  Rather, I'll mention if there are picnic tables, decent bathrooms, adequate parking, etc.

And, if the online review pool is polluted by worthless reviews, then the best way to counteract that is to post valuable ones.

Agreed, I go by date first, to see if a negative or positive review was years ago and something might be different now, then I use the good ol fashioned law of averages, by taking the super negative and the super positive out of the equation, then read the rest and see if there are people who were caught taking advantage of something or are upset about things I don't find a problem.  Like when looking for a place to camp, my wife found reviews for a place we were staying and every negative review complained about it being a rocky parking lot to camp at.  It was Deming, NM and that's what you will get in the desert.  Another time at a campground the only negative review was from a guy who basically sounded like he acted like a complete jerk and it didn't work out so well for him. 

[roadman65]

Mississippi has a good one on I-22 entering the state from Alabama which has free Wifi.

NJ has the worst, as most have no bathrooms and closed to cars as well.  I-287 had only one northbound area with a tourist center at one time, but now its trucks only.  Most has to do with NJ being suburban and either crimes (which closed Tall Oaks Picnic Area on the GSP in Cranford) or party going teens would hang out because of the lack of no one around other than drivers.

Plus most traffic in NJ is local commuters except for the NJ Turnpike which still has service areas built.  Besides NJ is so small one can get through it quickly and make it to New York or PA or points south on I-95 to wait to stop anyway.

[kphoger]

I can't remember exactly which motel it was for, but my favorite bad review so far had a management reply that included the setence "We stand by the Chicago Police Department's decision to remove you from the property at 3:30 AM" or something pretty close to that.