Cities.
I recently moved to Northern Virginia/DC area for work. I’m not trying to claim traffic is better here. What I do claim is that there are more alternatives to getting around the traffic.
The first obvious one is the metro for going into DC. But other than that there are toll roads that don’t have much traffic even at peak times. And my job is also in NoVa 20 minutes away, and skirting around the suburbs in Virginia the traffic isn’t that bad.
In Utah along the wasatch front, the main way to get anywhere really is I-15, which gets so backed up during rush hour. If it’s between 4-7 on a weekday and you need to go somewhere other than your local city, you’re going to get stuck in traffic, there’s no way around it.
Just my personal anecdotal experience is that rush hour traffic affected me more in Utah than it has in northern Virginia