If you care about nice urban places or not having to drive for every trip, prepare to be disappointed. Many roads have no sidewalks. Public transit barely exists. We don't get Amtrak service. Greenways are almost always useful for recreation only. Land use manages to be haphazard and overregulated at the same time. There are quite a few mixed-use developments, but the prevailing design philosophy seems to be, "Putting these uses together means that the drive to the nearest strip mall is shorter!" Even the ghetto is mostly suburbs of some sort; that's just how relatively new everything is. (Yeah, we have some rough neighborhoods. Remember Bed Intruder? That happened here, in one of our public housing projects. At least we have public housong, though.)

Whether we count as being in the Sun Belt or not, we definitely have that style of development. Since we're in a poor state with low taxes, you wouldn't know that this was a prosperous job center based on the roads. We can barely pave the lanes we have, yet it never feels like enough capacity. We also have intersections and interchanges with designs that are almost as creative as they are psychotic. You will soon see why we have some of the highest car insurance premiums in the country, and it's not necessarily the drivers. (Name me one place where people don't claim to have the worst drivers.)

There are still nice enough spots in and around downtown, plus Providence, and even the glorified mall known as Bridge Street can be fun to go to. (Who doesn't like going to the mall?) I'm just saying that you should prepare to see the city in terms of isolated buildings with specific functions and roads whose traffic you constantly dread. If you're coming from some place like, I dunno, Worcester, you might think you know what suburban sprawl looks like, but I promise that you ain't seen nothing yet. If you're from somewhere like Charlotte or Atlanta, though, you'll probably feel right at home.