Do they exist? There’s only 130,000 in my city and it’s VERY spread out, but whoever designed the roads was a drunken dunce. You can’t go anywhere without driving on one of 4 major roads, all of which get backed up for miles every damn day. Today it took me an hour to drive 5 miles halfway across town and back. Needless to say, I won’t be spending my entire life in this dump of a city (where you can smell the river from 500 yards away).
It’ll be a few years before I’m in any kind of position where I can move away, so in the meantime I’m researching various potential places of residence. Traffic is one of my big concerns. If I have to spend an hour a day in traffic, I’d end up wasting two years of my life idly sitting by inhaling exhaust fumes by the time I retire. That can’t be good for the 'ol brain cells.
`They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I’ve driven in almost every sizable city in North America, and seen bad (if not necessarily horrible) traffic in all of them.
Your best bet is to choose a city with good public transportation.
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Our traffic still sucks, but with a county of 500,000 people, I can get to and from work during rush hour (about 9 miles) around 20-25 minutes.
Since I don’t drive but a short distance (maybe 2 miles) on the highway most of my time is spent driving 35 - 40 mile per hour speed limit streets and traffic lights.
The times that it snows quite a bit (which it really doesn’t happen a lot) it can take me an hour or more to get home. But that’s very bad weather.
I feel pretty fortunate I guess, I live in Colorado Springs BTW.
I may be an exception though, so don’t take my word for it.
As I recall, Cincinnati didn’t have bad traffic at all.
But then again, I moved to Boston from there, so I may just be holding a candle.
A woman needs four animals in her life: A mink in the closet, a Jaguar in the garage, a tiger in the bedroom, and an ass to pay for it all.
—Zsa Zsa Gabor
My almanac lists Toledo as 53rd largest city in the nation with about 312,000 people, and I gotta say, the traffic here ain’t bad at all. I make a 12 mile drive from just west of the city to downtown everyday between 7 and 8 AM. It almost never takes more than 15 minutes to get here.
I think the decent traffic is mostly due to the fact that there is nothing to do in Toledo, hence no one is on the road trying to get there.
Damn…I was just about to post Columbus, and MeanJoe beat me to it.
We have over a million and a half, all told, and while traffic can get bad, it usually runs smoothly unless there’s some sort of accident. I can’t remember the last time I was at a standstill on the freeway in Columbus, but that seems to happen frequently everywhere else I go.
Drain, that is because all the traffic backups are just outside of Columbus on the interstate orange barrel breeding grounds. The traffic never manages to get into the city.
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
Here in St. Louis, the Interstates are bad and of course, the trips to the outer suburbs are horrific. However, if you live in one of the older areas and work downtown, you can usually arrange your trip using the pre-interstate street system, complete with wide streets, synchronized traffic lights and numerous bypasses in case of an accident or other tie-up. Just stay off the side streets, however, because St. Louis has more stop signs than any city of its size in the U.S.
I understand all the words, they just don’t make sense together like that.
Kansas City isn’t too bad with two exceptions: I-35 into downtown from Johnson County and the Grandview Triangle confluence of I-435, I-635, and US 71. If you’re smart, you can avoid both of them. Other than those two rush hour bottlenecks, traffic is pretty smooth.
I don’t even bother trying to drive in Barcelona. It’s not worth it. Get this, the south loop around the city is only two lanes in either direction and is always backed up all the way to Cornellà, which is the local equivalent of Assboink, Idaho.
I lived in Charleston SC for four years(a Semi large city). As I recall,as long as you stayed away from the historic “market” section traffic was not bad at all.
Well, KC has I-35, 435, 635, I-70, 470, 40 hwy, 71 hwy, I-69, 169, all as trunk lines, but the only area that ever really gets backed up (barring accidents) is the infamous “Grandview Triangle”, the basic idea of which is to slam the three largest highways right into each other at the same point, reducing all into one lane, and a huge, snarled mess. Terrible. BUT a light shines in the distance. They are in the midst of redesigning the triangle, and should be finished in about 10 years. So it shall be made better.
Not bad traffic. I owe it to our strong inter-city travel routes, in addition to wide highways.
Every 8th road is a large, four lane, divided road, which helps ALOT.
–Tim
You can’t accidently create a handicapped baby whilst smoking pot.
You mean there are some. I live in Roseville, MI. Our major freeways are 3 to four lanes each way, and if they were 10 lanes each way, we would still have major backups.
And don’t forget, this is Michigan’s second season, the first being Winter, and the second is construction. I hate seeing all those orange barrels
In Hampton Roads (Norfolk) traffic is a breeze. The main routes, 64, 564, 44, 264 all have HOV lanes, speeding you on your way. They are open to single-occupant vehicles during non-peak hours.
Voted Best Sport
And narrowly averted the despised moniker Smiley Master
Ever try Boston? I live in NYC, and don’t have a single word of praise for the morons with whom I’m forced to share my roads (present company excepted, of course), but, having driven all over, I’ve got to say I’ve never hated driving anywhere more than in Boston (with the exception, here at home, of the Boro Park section of Brooklyn…butg we’re talking on a citywide scale, now).
I’ve been to most large cities in the US. Boston sucks because no one knows how to drive there, (there is a reason the rest of New England calls them Massholes…), and the city is hard to navigate, thanks to no city planning. New York, my familial home, sucks because of the sheer number of people crammed into one city, and that the street design makes for amazing grid-lock.
But nothing, and I mean NOTHING, beats the Autobaun in Germany. Picture this: when the country was seperated, there were TWO highways connecting east and west. The Autobaun to the north, which leads to Berlin from most northern cities is the larger one.
When the wall fell, they didn’t immediately build any new roads. So all this traffic was being funneled onto ONE road. We took a bus from Hannover to Berlin. It should have taken something like 2.5 hours. It took 5. At one point, the bus was stopped for an hour. People were taking walks in the fields. It was amazing. After that, I never complain about traffic here.
No city planning? Bah!
We let cows plan most of downtown!
(rumor has it the meandering streets started out as cowpaths). So don’t give me that no-city-planning marlarky!
BTW: some people I knew in college that were from NYS easily passed the Mass road test after failing the NYS test. It appears that it is very easy to get a drivers license here…
The traffic never manages to get into the city.