And yet getting across town is still a pain and a half.
I'd rather spend 45 minutes standing up in the subway, free to zone out or read a book, rather than 30 minutes stuck in stop-and-go traffic. (And definitely rather than 2 hours stuck in the same traffic.)
I think you mean "or in Austin any time between midnight and 11:59pm the next day.
Used to live in a condo with a direct line of sight to 35, it would be no shocker to wake up at 2am, walk to the bathroom and glance out my sliding glass door randomly to see 35 backed up.
New York can fix those problems easily, but they have some sort of Stockholm syndrome with their unbelievably terrible traffic situation. But when it's not rush hour, you can cruise twenty blocks at a time through Midtown before you hit a short red light. That's pretty nice. Everything's on a grid, one-way streets follow a pattern, and there's a lot of neat stuff to see as you drive.
Which is ridiculous because it's about a mile.