Complaints about traffic in the Seattle area are so common that it’s easy to believe it’s actually as bad as it seems. But maybe we’re exaggerating? Maybe we should simply adjust our expectations?

I remember finishing a meeting in downtown Vancouver and needing to make another an hour later at Delta Port past Surrey. My hosts downtown said I should just forget it — there’s no way to get there through the traffic. Of course Vancouver lacks freeways so you crawl through city streets. But I ventured out anyway.

Consider this opinion piece from Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. We suffer from “a deflation of greatly raised expectations,” the writer argues, because we actually expect to travel across vast metropolitan areas at high speeds. I think nothing of going from Redmond to Ballard to South Seattle and back in a single evening. But fewer people would do the equivalent in Vancouver.