being small town by choice these past 40 years, my tolerance for the benefits of congestion under the rubric of 'restaurants/entertainment/etc' is markedly altered;

My 'Jaws of Hell' award currently is Seattle and I refuse to go north of Centralia. PDX has it's own moments/hours of absurd/pointless gridlock, as I no longer have excuse to dally there.

Chicago/LA/Denver have all surpassed my ability to endure and I no longer approach within hundreds of miles.

My introduction to Houston a few years back was marred by 3 1/2 hours to travel about 5 miles.

I worked in the Boston area just before and after the Ted Williams Tunnel was opened. While the tunnel helped traffic flow around the airport, much of the region remains a road system of paved cow paths and psychopaths with one hand on the wheel and the other flying the bird. I disliked visiting there back before nav software on smartphones became cheap and effective. You hesitate or merely blink, you're dead. You can't make the turn or the merge. And one wrong turn, you're in the middle of the youth meeting at the Brockton Gun & Knife Club.

I don't know, but I hate the Front Range of Colorado from Fort Collins all the way to the Springs.

Denver Metro Area driving tip: Drive in the right lane, NOBODY drives there.

I have visited and driven in LA and Houston enough to know I would never want to live in either city.

US23 in Michigan between Rogers City and Cheboygen. Might be damn near 4 cars and 1 tractor trailer going by every hour. It gets worse Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day weekends; they tow boats. Of course all hell breaks loose mid-November when the hordes of deer hunters show up. Gotta be at least twenty of them all towing trailers with ATV/UTVs. Of course we leave before snow mobile season. One can only take so much.

quote:

Originally posted by exx1976:
Chicago is horrendous.

Second. It's ridiculous the hours of the day on a Sunday and it's still horrendous.

LA, hands down. if Cali was the most gun friendly state in the country, and LA was the most gun friendly city, in the super gun friendly state of California, I still wouldn't live in LA because of the traffic.

Los Angeles ranks first with an average of 81 hours per year spent in traffic.
San Francisco ranks third with an average of 75 hours.

I can only talk about cities I drive in. Which is all any of can do.

Austin, Texas.

Way worse than Houston, Dallas, Ft. Worth, or San Antonio.

For the size of the city ​and population, Louisville, KY. is just plain unbelievable. There's parts of the City​ that will take you more than an hour to drive one (1) mile.

Grid lock on all major roads and interstates and highways for hours.

You would think that Louisville was a much more populated city then it is. Not only that, but endless road construction, yet the roads never get better!

I stay the hell away from there as much as possible, but unfortunately I have to go there sometime.


ARman

LA, by far. I've driven in Taipei, Tokyo, Paris, Manhattan, DC, every major city in Texas, and many others all over the place, and LA is the worst of all, to me. The sheer scope of it...

Have driven in LA, Houston, and extensively in Atlanta. LA is by far worse than either Houston or Atlanta. Houston people talk about how bad their traffic is, but being from ATL, I wasn't impressed. It can be difficult if you're a visitor and don't know your way around, though, driving on what is basically one gigantic Spaghetti Junction (for the Atlanta folks.)

But LA... there is bumper to bumper traffic 24 hours a day, in my limited experience driving there.

Atlanta, there are good commutes and bad commutes. Its gotten to where weekends are as bad as work days, and maybe worse, because out of towners not knowing where they're going. I'm sure that contributes a lot to LA.

 
I haven't lived a lot of places, but the DC beltway is pretty horrible. One of the greatest pleasures I got in my 30 years of living there was shutting down the beltway. The occasion was a sad one, a funeral, but I didn't know the guy personally. He was a fellow officer in my wife's department, and he was to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The service was outside the beltway on New Hampshire Ave, and when it came time for the trip to Arlington, 4 cruisers were detailed to block all four lanes of the beltway where New Hampshire entered, and I was riding shotgun in one of them. Montgomery County motor officers also blocked each entrance ramp on the path to the river, and similar courtesy from US Park Police on the VA side. It was a very eerie ride on the beltway that day, with just the funeral procession having the entire roadway.
 

Personal experiences:

NoVa / DC is horrible. Like horrible traffic on freaking SATURDAY!

Atlanta is really bad.

Charlotte is bad but do-able.

LA is unreal for the sheer number of cars on the roads but the highways are so prevalent and built up they mostly have the capacity to handle it.

Raleigh / Durham has been pretty bad lately because of the massive growth and the infrastructure has not come close to keeping up... They have had I40 under 'reconstruction' for about 2 years now. It is not uncommon to take 90 minutes to go 25-30 miles. For a relatively small MSA that's pretty crappy.

Traffic sucks.

---------------------------

Phoenix in rush hour sucks too. When I came to scout for jobs in Arizona wanting to move to a free state from New York, I experienced Phoenix traffic and decided to go to the much less densely populated Prescott area. Another place that sucks is the island of Oahu

LA, I've driven in every major metro in the country. No one can compete.

Looks like LA is the majority nominee which I support.

In addition to the sheer traffic volume, traffic during non-commute hours is slowed down by some local practice of freeway traffic slowing down near exit and on ramps. I don't understand the reason except for maybe people don't know how to get off and on freeways. But even the number 1 lanes are affected by this phenomenon.

I've had the opportunity to drive in a lot of places and DC with its 8/10 lane parking lot is bad, as can be NYC, but Boston, Mass. was by far the worst place ever to get behind the wheel, you are putting your life into everyone else's hands.

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
LA, by far. I've driven in Taipei, Tokyo, Paris, Manhattan, DC, every major city in Texas, and many others all over the place, and LA is the worst of all, to me. The sheer scope of it...

This.

LA's traffic is a nightmare because of the scope. Traffic in a city center is expected. Traffic all the way out into every side street, and suburb 50 miles out from the city center and spilling into the next county...that's LA.

I will say, however, that although the congestion is bad--the drivers themselves seem to be pretty skilled and well behaved. Traffic is a daily occurrence, so you don't often see shenanigans like people trying to use the shoulder as an additional lane or cutting to the front of a line.

When I was there (1969-1971), most traffic engineers said Tehran, Iran was the worst. The people had just transitioned from donkeys to automobiles, and the latter don't have brains or common sense. Couple that with the typical attitude that "no one has any rights but me" and it really makes a mess. Iranians didn't ever queue up for anything, and at traffic signals they'd stop, and then overflow over onto the other half of the street. When the light went green there were two full lines of cars facing each other trying to funnel down to the correct driving lanes. Four-way blockages where each car had its front bumper in the center of the driver's door ahead of it were common. Have you ever seen a one-way dead-end street? Tehran had them. Iranians didn't pay any attention to one-way signs--they were for everyone else.

flashguy