Yeah, only we city slickers and suburban commuters would experience thison a regular basis for it to be a nuisance...

A suggestion I have forming in my head for Honda is to implement a feature that detects when you are rolling and intermittently pressing the gas and brakes at, say, <10mph (a la freeway backup or approaching a city stop when traffic tends slides forward a bit). The car would not shut off the engine but instead go into 'eco' since 3 cylinders can certainly handle such conditions. This way the engine stays on as you crawl thru traffic- making the ride easier- yet does not suck gas like the V6 it is. Autostop would still come on if you went from this 'crawl' condition to a complete stop for more than a few seconds. And if you are smoothly decelerating from speed, autostop would still operate as it does now. Perhaps a 'traffic jam' button on the dash could be pressed by the driver to dis/enable this feature instead of making the car guess when these conditions exist. (I tend to prefer the ability to manually override features, though).

In the meantime, your shifting method works, or you can turn on one of the defroster settings- the AC stays on, keeping the engine on. (Note that just having the AC on does not keep the engine on.) This way, no shifting is needed.