Driving in SoCal. It's a bit like Doug Stanhope says , shit here just works. A lot of the smarts are built into infrastructure, relieving you of the need to think too much. Of course this can have downside (electing Forrest Gump to office as an example) but there is no denying the comfort in living on autopilot.
In Oz, a 10-lane highway would be littered with glass, but I begin to ascribe that to design. Part of the poor design of Sydney roads is due to geographical constraint - it being a settlement of heavily dissected sandstone, where here it's flatter. Partly though it's just institutional laziness.
It's amusing to see what happens here when the city grid system meets a hill. They just go up and over, where we would definitely go for the contour, and fuck the system.
I haven't yet formed an opinion as to which approach yields more real amenity, but as a hiker I tend toward geography over system. Time will tell.
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