> you don't reach certain peaks of crappiness accidentally, it takes _work_.

Have you really never seen what happens when something grows organically without global maintenance? Not saying that this is what happened in Germany, but "it takes work" sounds naive.

It doesn't take work to write a crappy codebase: all you have to do is add code without really caring about the overall architecture.

Or said differently, if you can fix the German traffic engineering, you should apply there because I'm sure they would be happy to have an easy and perfect solution.

Can't speak to Germany, but one thing I like in the Netherlands is that if you approach an empty intersection the light will automatically turn green for you. Have never seen anything like that in North America.

And the roads themselves are good in NL (huge contrast when I moved to Montreal, where we'd have a metal mesh underneath bridges to catch falling concrete)