I was about to respond with a knee-jerk "Try it in Dallas around 5:30pm, or in Austin any time between 3pm and 6pm", but I guess it's all subjective.
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.
I think he meant getting "crosstown" meaning going east to west or vice versa. This requires taking one of 3 subways, a bus, taxi or walking. It is a pain compared to the myriad of ways to get north and south.
Driving in Manhattan is great... when there's no traffic and you don't need to park.
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.
When I lived in NYC over the summer, one of the things that blew my mind was how easy and cheap and quick it was to get anywhere in the city. YYMV though, I guess.
