The public transit is so widely adopted that the roads aren't terrible in general. With the exception of any time I wanted to go over the GW bridge, I didn't really have that bad of an experience in NYC.
My biggest traffic complaint was that the traffic patterns were really difficult to pin down. As in, on Thursday night at 9:45pm or on a Sunday afternoon at 1pm I would hit major traffic or a completely plugged up freeway for no obvious reason, but those were the exceptions and not the rule.
The commutes were extremely predictable both on the trains as well as driving in (I commuted from Westchester to lower Manhattan daily, but mostly took the metro north and subway because parking costs are outrageous in NYC).
Utah was in really good shape planning for growth until the Sierra Club started imposing its influence everywhere, which prevented the infrastructure from keeping up with the growth. A robust west-side freeway system from Magna to Spanish Fork needed to be installed 25 years ago and Utahn's will be paying for that mistake for decades...just like its terrible airport design.