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I was surprised at how bad traffic is in and around downtown Madison Wisconsin is during rush hour but it makes sense when you look at the city on a map. Downtown sits between two lakes on a strip of land that's only a few blocks wide. To get from one side of town to the other, you either have to squeeze through that little strip of land or drive all the way around one of the lakes.
I can't imagine a downtown of any city in the country squeezed into such a confined space as the Madison isthmus. Add all the crazy diagonal streets and that you can't drive your car on State Street and DT Madison is a pain to get around.
I'm gonna say any sizeable city with jobs and a highway. I peak at a lot of threads for other cities and traffic is the main thing people complain about. Even if it takes 2 minutes to make a left turn, people say traffic is terrible.
I can't imagine a downtown of any city in the country squeezed into such a confined space as the Madison isthmus. Add all the crazy diagonal streets and that you can't drive your car on State Street and DT Madison is a pain to get around.
And don't forget all the one-way streets. It makes sense for the big arterial streets but all the one-way side streets are maddening. Oh, and my favorites are the non-contiguous streets that just do a 90-degree curve onto another street instead of forming a conventional intersection with that street so that you could have just continued on the street you were just driving on instead of having to find your way back to it... It's like DT Madison is deliberately designed to make drivers go bonkers.
People are either surprised by Denver traffic, or talk about how "good" it is. Lots of comparisons to LA.
It's really just as bad as any other major city, but because the size of the city is fairly small, it doesn't seem as bad. The congestion per mile is still pretty bad during rush hour. It takes about 45 mins to an hour to cross town in the afternoon.
Another one was Minneapolis. All of suburban routes are solid red 2-3 hours every morning and night. There are even some spots that maintain congested well into the late night. For a city that shuts down at 10pm, it was weird seeing such a heavy flow of cars anywhere on the freeways between 1-3am. Also getting to the airport in the middle of a week day can take up to 45 mins. It seems like their problem is that they built so many freeways, and made it inconvenient to take surface streets, that there are bottle necks at every merge in the system. I'm sure it was fine a decade or two ago, but with how fast the city is growing, it seems to be getting chocked now.
It's interesting how many people are surprised to learn many of the nation's major metropolitan areas have bad traffic. Surprised about traffic in Seattle or Portland or the Twin Cities? No. Surprised about bumper-to-bumper traffic in Chattanooga? Yes.
I lived in Delaware (northern DE - Newark, New Castle area) for many years. Due to its location between the northern cities of New York and Philly, and the southern cities of Baltimore and DC (and point beyond) vacationers would clog the highways, and backups could be for MILES. In addition, heading to the Delaware beaches during NASCAAR weekends was also a chore.
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