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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

See that blip for Rochester,NY with the top satisfaction and a high speed index? That's where I live and I can say it's the best driving city I've ever experienced.

An excellent balance of bandwidth and saturation and average distance, makes most drivers here really easy going and happy.

...unless your trying to get to East Ave Wegmans at 5:30 pm on a Friday :)

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A game I used to play back in the day when I had to drive on the interstates was to maintain sufficient distance to the car in front of me so that anyone could trivially make lane changes, etc. The amazing side effect was that typically the cars behind me would start doing the same thing. It was mildly pleasurable.

I've entertained the idea on multiple occasions that there might be a way to introduce good actors which use traffic calming driving techniques onto the road with the purpose of helping to regulate the flow of traffic. This assumes that there is a way to influence traffic on a large scale by way of a few good drivers.

I've adopted this strategy as well. Anecdotal, but traffic seems "calmer" around me. Maybe that's just because I'm calmer. It also has a nice side effect of not "participating" in stop-and-go traffic and I don't have to clutch/shift as much in my manual transmission.

Full disclosure - generally I like to drive fast. I have a sporty car and do several track days per year. I just leave the fast driving to the track (and the mountains in certain cases).

Rochester is one of those northeastern cities that destroyed its own downtown neighborhoods for the sake of building a moat of highways around the city center. As a visitor, it was depressing how detached the city center was from anything, and how pedestrian-unfriendly and relatively dead the streets were, filled with large office buildings, surface parking lots, and not much else. It’s a “great driving city” because there’s more empty road space than anyone knows what to do with. Enormous waste of space, infrastructure money, and human potential.

The pictures from before the 1950s vs. after are stark. http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/

That highway moat is currently in the processes of being filled back in: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/business/old-highway-pave...

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