Yeah, it's a pretty shitty game. There's always cross-traffic, and it's always in your way, and you have to restart a race fifty times to actually not crash and flip in the air eighty times and lose ten seconds or so against the lead car. Fucking annoying shit.
Now, when it comes to racing games that put you in the middle of the highway and have you race, I'd say Burnout 3 and Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 2 are the fucking kings of this. In Wangan you just take a pretty big speed hit, nothing too serious, if you hit some traffic, and in Burnout you actually get points for wreckin' shit. It might be unrealistic and all, but shit, it's better than the car flipping eighty times, bouncing all about the road, all the while not taking damage at all on NFSU. And since when did I give a damn about realism?
My point is, it's all about the race. Anything that doesn't facilitate the awesomeness of the race doesn't really need to be in there.