Do you prefer driving in the city or in a small town?

As I’ve gotten older, I would rather drive in the country or in small towns. I don’t like the long wait in traffic jams. We’ve bought a retirement/vacation home in a golf cart community with more than 80 miles of cart paths. To be honest, that is my preference. I love to meander.

I love driving in my rural area. The biggest problems are the wild turkeys, deer, opossums, skunks, raccoons and squirrels who have a sense of macadam entitlement.

There is one traffic light in the town (pop. 1600), and a traffid jam is five cars and a logging truck.

Sadly, there is a huge problem of teens who drink and drive, usually pickup trucks. Every year several are killed. When they drive up my tailpipe and badger me at night, I simply pull over and motion them to pass.

@gailcalled just wrote the same answer I was preparing, only she did a better job than I would have.

The city, nice and fast like being in race. P.S. I learned how to drive on the L.I.E.

Driving in the city is fun because of what you see, but the traffic and confusing one-way streets suck. :P

How about in between? How big or small can town or city be? My city is about 100,000 and I’m fine driving here. But I too love to meander and can do that here to an extent. South of me is 500,000 and it pays to be alert there. I can’t imagine the 5 million places.

You’re kidding, right?

I vastly prefer small town driving. Here in Seattle, nobody pays attention, and in Boston they actively try to hit you. By contrast, in the smaller towns, people are more likely to notice another car on the road and less likely to vent their frustrations by T-boning or side-swiping you.

Then again, last time I was in Wichita, it was like being on a different planet, so I should not be surprised that you and I have had different experiences.

If driving in the city doesn’t kill you directly, the stress it causes will. I cant stand it, worst part of working in a city.

Small town. Less traffic.

Seen one country road you have seen them all! Driving downtown Chicago is amazing…challenging too but the architecture is about the best in the world and once you make it through the city to the lake front you get a wonderful cruise down Lake Shore Drive past all the museums. Nothing like it!

@Cruiser I beg to differ. Can you not tell the difference between a corn field, a forest, a river, and a mountain range? Or the difference between pavement, hard-pack, and mud? I find buildings to be more, “see one, seen them all” and the roads themselves to be more monotonous as well.

Let us chalk that up to a difference of opinion.

@jerv Of course and it is again a matter of semantics! A country road is a road in the country as in a road through the corn fields. A road through the forest is a nice drive through a forest, and a road through the mountains is hardly a country road….that is a ridge-line roadway in the mountains!

Plus you can drive through my city where I live and be satisfied with the small city warmth and charm….40 minutes east of me and you can get a stiff neck looking up at all the sky scrapers of Chicago! Life is grand and take your pick of Sunday drives in your Corvair! ;)

BTW….if you have every driven from Chicago to Denver or LA….all you see for an entire day is corn fields….in the country….and it gets old very quick.

@Cruiser And flat gets old quick too, hence my displeasure during much of the journey between San Diego and Wichita. At least NH roads were like the weather; if you don’t like them, wait a minute. I think much of the country lacks that diversity.

@jerv No Fair!! NH roads are the finest in the land and I get to compare Illinois prairie?? <<sulks off>>

@Cruiser Life isn’t fair! Suck it up :D

@jerv Now you tell me! :O

I love meandering in the country too. I was talking about actually maneuvering through the town or the city. Still prefer city! Although…Wichita is nothing like Seattle, of course….

Small town. As I don’t live in a city I don’t always know exactly what lane I need to be in or which way to turn on a roundabout. I need to have time to read any road signs but I often find that city drivers expect you to know the area like they do and are very quick to let you kno if they think you asre being too slow.

@Leanne1986 There are roundabouts in small towns all over New England, and tiny traffic circles all throughout the Seattle area. And even in rural NH, other drivers will be more than happy to let you know that you are too slow and have some contempt for those who don’t know the roads.

@jerv Of course there are roundabouts in small towns here as well but it seems that the way of life is a bit slower in the smaller, less built up places and people don’t get the arse with you if you slow down a little to check a road sign before commiting to a lane.

@Leanne1986 Not my experience with small towns in the Northeast. If you don’t know whether to turn or not, don’t get in the way of someone who knows where they are going; just as true in Seattle as it is in rural NH or MA.

@jerv But how do you get out of their way??? Our roundabouts lead in from a one lane (each way) road!

@Dutchess_III Pick an exit at random, and go far enough from the roundabout to pull over until you figure out where you are going :p

Seriously, that is how it’s done.

I forgot to mention another thing that annoys people from where I used to live; people who can’t figure out how to pass on a 1.8 lane road, and when I say “1.8 lane”, I mean “enough room for two cars to pass without ripping their mirrors of unless one of them is an incompetent buffoon”. The locals all know how to do it, but many flatlanders can’t figure out how wide their cars are or where they are in relationship to the road.

Here in Seattle, the roads are all wide enough for two cars to pass each other easily with enough room left over for a Kawasaki Ninja to blow between them. And from what I recall of Kansas, there is even more room.

@jerv You do know that you and I are in different countries right? I’m in the UK.

@Leanne1986 All I am saying is that different places have different road rules. In the places I’ve lived, even the small towns get pretty uppity if you get in somebody’s way; apparently the same is not true of the small towns you’re used to either.