One thing that came as a culture shock for me is that I’m used to driving like 4 hours to see relatives. And this is usually several times a year. Then I heard from some Britons that they have rarely visit their relatives who are only like a hour drive away. Really messed me up the first time.
I’ve heard similar things. Like, I’ve had work commutes that are an hour long before. (Not that that’s healthy or ideal, but it’s far from rare)
And they say we should all just switch to electric bikes like in the Netherlands. I tried showing them a comparison of the states using a map but turns out “I am just being difficult”
The “map” is not the problem, you just completely fucked up your city planning. Size of a country has zero impact on your daily commute.
Size of a country has zero impact on your daily commute.
Lol Ok. Guess everyone has to crowd together in comparatively tiny little cities. All this usable land outside the cities is now uninhabitable. Genius.
Let me guess, we will own nothing and be happy, right? Oh and don’t forget about eating bugs!! Yum yum!
Go slink back to hexbear.
Are you completely insane?
Your response has nothing to do with my comment.
Here I’ll speak slowly
We have a big country. Big spaces mean longer commute. City design can't change physics of space-time.That’s not how cities work. That’s just how America decided to approach that problem.
To spell it out for you: your commute is always in your local area. The size of your country is not relevant to your local area. What is relevant, is density. Density though, has nothing to do with the size of your country. Unfortunately, you are about twice as dense as Hong Kong.
I mean, this sounds just like a big city thing, not an American thing. I live in Paris and hour long commutes are common here too.
As European cities are close together though, this can lead to situations where travelling between cities is not what takes the most time. I once (about a year ago) travelled a Paris-London which took me about 5 hours from start to finish - the Eurostar takes only just over 2 hours. The rest was travelling from my home to Gare du Nord, from St. Pancras to my destination, and border checks before boarding at Gare du Nord (thank Brexit for that one).
I would make the point (not necessarily for an hour’s drive) that the roads are often more tiring to drive on in the UK – that is, they’re not as flat, wide or straight as freeways often are, so require more concentration. Driving for an hour along Welsh country lanes doesn’t feel the same as hitting the freeway for an hour. Just my two cents/tuppence
The mountains of Northern California are treacherous. Many of the highways up there are frequently shut down for extended periods.
Being from SoCal and having lived in the UK, let me explain:
In the UK many of the roads are quite literally conversions from horse drawn carriage paths. In some cases, a drunk wanker from Liverpool could draw a better line for a road than most roads connecting off many of the UK motorways (Especially in Wales or Scotland). Add in round abouts, hills, creeks, rivers and stupidly narrow bridges, it’s difficult.
I’d sincerely rather drive the Grapevine through Mammoth into Yosemite Village with black ice warnings than try and drive myself from Maidenbower, West Sussex UK to Dundee, Scotland again tbh.
What roads did you take? A majority of that is dualed.
While living in the UK, I bought a Heritage pass and took off almost every weekend either by light rail or by car. When my wife came to visit though, we drove from my flat near Crawley to Scotland over a 3 day trip. We visited in order: Ashford, Broomfield (Leeds Castle), Rettondon, Chelmsford, Ipswitch, Cambridge, Nottingham, Leeds, Newcastle upon Tyne, Edinburgh, Perth and finally ending in Dundee where I have distant relatives.
In all my trips, driving through the hills of Yorkshire and Cumbria are the scariest, but getting to Scone Palace outside of Perth through snow was quite challenging.
So not really the main roads.
Most of the non main roads are a result of the feudal farming system. The US differs because people could buy up large rectangles of land which fit nicely together. The farming in Europe was a piecemeal affair, and roads were built onto to that. The UK is a very London centric country. The further north you get the less that is spent on roads and transport.
Yeah the Karen migrations are rough.
Or even at night. Lotta these highways though just a straight line can be real dangerous.
Yeah, I can understand that. My cars got cruise control. Id doubt thatd be very effective in the UK less your in some scenic area like the Cotswolds.
Cruise control is fine on motorways, but that doesn’t mean you can relax when you’re still surrounded by other vehicles also going at 70mph!
Same experience when my wife and I went to Scotland to visit friends. We were in Glasgow and wanted to check out Edinburgh, less than an hour bus ride, for the day. They told us that we were crazy and that’s a whole weekend trip.
We laughed pretty hard. A full hour drive is only half of a daily work commute in Toronto, on a good day.
I used to commute Edinburgh - Glasgow, and plenty of others do the same. It’s also common for folk to do the trip just for an evening to go to a gig or something (a lot of tours will have their only Scottish date in Glasgow). I think your friends were probably meaning that you’d need more than a day to fully be able to see what Glasgow has to offer? If not, that seems really odd as it’s a busy commuter route.
Nope, they were really saying that you can’t see anything there unless you go for the whole weekend.
We walked around, checked out the castle, saw a lame touristy film about Nessy, sampled some incredible whisky and were home for dinner.
It was kinda the same with St Abbs. They said we had to leave Friday morning and leave Sunday evening (again from Glasgow) or we wouldn’t get to do much. Now I’m not going to say the place isn’t gorgeous, but what we did was hang out in a… cottage? I’m not sure what to rightly call it, but we hung out at someone’s place, played board games, played cards, hung out by the bluffs, on the beach etc.
I don’t disagree that it was a relaxing and fun weekend, but we didn’t need to spend a full 2.5 days there to do what we did. They made it seem like if we lost even an hour the weekend was lost.
It turns out it’s not the distance to our family that’s important, we just don’t fucking like them
Then you obviously dont apply to my analogy then. Knew someone would comment that eventually.
Canadian here. I drive 4 times a year to my family cottage 8 hours away.
I’ve got four different countries, with different languages and currencies, within a four hour drive from my house. I only drive if the road trip is the goal.
I once drove for 10 hours in the UK and was still in the same town! That magic roundabout is very confusing.
There is a story of a guy in England who sent a letter to his friend in Los Angeles. He asked him to “pop in” to New York City to see how his daughter is doing.
The LA guy wrote back and said it would be faster if he went himself.
I really don’t think Euros have a solid grasp of the scale of the US.
In the US, 100 years is a long time.
In England, 100 miles is a long distance.
In star trek, 100 miles is a lot of transporter chiefs.
In the delta quadrant, 70,000 years is a long distance
Here in Australia, during the 80’s, 90’s before widespread internet. There would be several European’s who needed rescuing each year as they decided to try and walk between major cities, because it looks close on a map.
I remember one German guy who needed rescuing while trying to walk from Sydney to Adelaide…that’s 1200km away…in a straight line.
Joke’s on him for wanting to go to Adelaide, honestly.
And remember, never go to Adelaide. It’s a hole (Not the Sunscreen Song)
Who wouldn’t want to visit the Black Stump?
Also in Europe if you get hungry you can pick mushrooms, skin a boar, or pop in to a town. In Australia you got… witchetty grub
Lmao just looked on a map, and it’s quite easy to see that that distance is comparable to walking from Great Yarmouth to St Davids… twice
Lol, that’s great.
I’ve also heard of Europeans planning vacations in the US, expecting to see New York, Florida, Texas, LA, etc. without realizing how much travel that is.
I met a foreign exchange student in Australia. I asked what they were planning to do for their break.
They’d recently taken up surfing, and couldn’t decide if they wanted to surf the east, west, north, or south coast. So they had decided they would stay in Alice Springs, basically in the middle of all of them, and do day trips to each one.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that to get to the nearest ocean from there takes about two solid days of driving. Add another day to get to a beach with decent surf.
Found out the same between Tokyo and Okinawa. It’s like flying from Washington DC to Miami. “Just take a train,” is 32 hours, plus time on a ferry.
Not a really a day trip, even though it “seems like Japan is a small country.”
Canada has a highway that goes between the most easterly and westerly points of the country. If you drove from end to end, stopping only for gas and drive through meals, it would take you about a week.
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The most easterly and westerly points on the mainland. You’re not getting from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland by highway.
There are ferries.
That guy just have been a huge idiot, I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people know how far away New York and Los Angeles are from each other.
I read that story in a book about the history of England: English history made brief, irreverent, and pleasurable.
The letter was from the 1800s I believe so maybe we can cut him some slack for not really knowing.
Ah right yeah fair enough! I thought you meant it happened in the past 15 years or something!
Shit if you’re in Los Angeles, you could spend 4 hours just to move 10 feet.
New York City has entered the chat.
No one drives in New York. There’s too much traffic.
Thanks, Yogi. I’ll Berra that in mind
Hawaii checking in. If a highway shuts down, book a hotel on the side you’re on.
Boston seemed like that too, when I was there, and I’m still wondering why anyone who lives there bothered to have a car. On the outskirts, yeah, but if you’ve got business in the heart of Boston specifically, it seems from experience you should just walk.
if the MBTA ever gets its shit together, cars could disappear entirely in the city
don’t hold your breath for that one
if the MBTA ever gets its shit together…
Might be better to plan for transporter technology than that, more plausible at least.
You’re talking about a space that is probably less than 15 square miles. Outside of that driving is a lot less painful.
The trains are so fucked that my 7 mile 30 minute bike commute is 55 minutes by train. It’s a straight line with one change.
Driving would be 30-50 aggravating minutes and $450 for a parking space.
Boston is a regional city that bizarrely believes itself to be a major international metropolis. The levels of journey times and cost of living are up to par anyway.
Need some more trains.
I remember this as, “Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time.”
Great way to look at it.
Traveling across the US is like switching to an alternate dimension where everything is pretty much the same, but a few things are off. Like, Congress is the same, but suddenly there are dunkin’ donuts everywhere and the land is weirdly flat
People say ‘whenever’ instead of ‘when’ and I want to clock them for it.
Except the guy you’re responding said ‘everywhere’
Thanks for sharing though.
I can see why you’ve read it that way, but I’m quite sure they’re saying that some people say a word slightly differently in another part of the USA and they’re joking that it makes them angry.
Oh I get it. The way it was written makes it a strange non sequitur.
Indeed!
Yes, this, thank you. Sorry, my jokes sometimes come off too aggressive online. I’m trying to work on that.
I think the commenter might have been talking about Americans in general.
So they take the opportunity whenever they can?
I just like to make stupid posts, sorry.
I’m right with you haha.
I thought about it and I say “whenever” pretty often.
It’s a weird thing to bother someone so much.
Whenever I think about the silly little things that bother people, I’m all, “Whatever could there reason be?”
But four a real problem, like one that should bug someone! I used to could go through a day without pain. I reckon I’m done got old.
Wander how the commenter wood fill about that. To much little stuff bothers folks. Shood worry about big thangs.
It’s a minor niggle I was joking about with hyperbole, but it does bother me a bit because ‘when’ means a specific time and ‘whenever’ means any of multiple times. Their meaning isn’t interchangeable.
Like: ‘I talked to my dad when he was in town’ means I talked with him that last time he was in town, but ‘I talked to my dad whenever he was in town’ means any or all the times he was in town – it might have been a hundred times or two, I can’t tell, but not the one time like the other more accurate sentence.
It doesn’t make me mad, but it very briefly ruffles my feathers. (e: and then I move right on)
You can drive for four hours and still be on I-5 in LA.
Yeah, define ‘driving’ lol
You can drive for 30 hours and still be on the same highway in the same state in Australia.
Damn, I thought the 22 hours to cross Ontario was long.
The thing is, Australia is basically the same size as America (minus Alaska), but only has 6 states and one state-sized territory. 7 compared to 48 means the time taken to travel across one state is much greater.
Canada is obviously a lot bigger than Australia, but it also has a lot more provinces/territories. 13, which is almost double. And while it’s a lot bigger, it’s nowhere near double the area. 30% extra land for 85% extra provinces, to be precise.
Pff in Australia I can travel over 2000km in a straight line and never leave my state, and it’s not even the biggest.
Now we need somebody from Siberia to tell us how they can drive for 5000km and never leave their federal subject (I had to look that up, it’s what the different regions of Russia are called)
I’m not Siberian, but from what I’ve gathered from the talks of people who lived there, is that people in far east Russia have a weird sense of time and distance. You might be in in the middle of fuck nowhere with the closest living person being like a 100km away from you, but when you call them with some any dumb questions like “Hey do you happen to have a bottle opener?” they respond with “Sure, I’ll be there shortly” and then they do indeed arrive… in 4 hours. It’s as if they don’t have places to be, and it’s totally okay for them to spend an entire day driving to a shop or to friend to lend them a screwdriver. It’s especially baffling to people who lived their entire lives within ~40km Moscow’s ring road and they hear stuff like “Minsk? Sure, that’s like a hand’s reach away - only 720 kilometers. I’ll drop by on the weekend”.
Fun fact for my fellow Americans the current Cannonball Run (New York City to Long Beach, Ca) record is 25 hours 39 minutes at an average rate of 110 mph.
So you can cross the country in just over a day provided you drive like a bat out of hell.
That’s been banned now, right?
It’s basically always been illegal due to speed limits, but the record above was set in 2021.
Yeah, quite a few attempts made during the pandemic is what I heard
The wild thing is that the pandemic record will likely stand for a VERY LONG time, if it is ever beaten.
It would require perfect traffic conditions or another pandemic, sooooooo … hopefully not anytime soon.
It’s always been illegal.
There is still a sign at the Portofino hotel in LA with the current record and it is definitely up to date.
It’s always been banned. Just like pot.
My wife and I drove from North Carolina, to Wisconsin, to South Dakota, and back to North Carolina again as a cross country road trip. We drove over four thousand miles.
It was fucking bizarre.
There comes a point where your mind can barely conceive that people are still speaking the same language. I think your monkey brain must assume that once you’re far enough away from home, then surely everything and everyone must be a foreigner.
And for sure, there are parts of the United States that seem to be literally foreign to one another, and there are parts of the Midwest that are such titanically empty swathes of corn fields and wind turbines that it seems like one has dropped into a parallel dimension.
But there’s something kind of awesome, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word, that it’s all one big country, one big union of people who have (more or less) decided to engage in one big human project all together.
I think everyone should have a chance to make such a journey. It really crams the concept of the scale of this country into your consciousness in a way that can’t be done without actually covering the mileage, on the ground, for yourself.
If you’re originally from the Midwest you get the opposite experience:
There are places that you can’t tell what town you’re in, for miles and miles, because buildings are everywhere, and there are no cornfields or empty areas to separate cities. Cities are just allowed to grow into each other in some places.
Road trips were always the thing that made me appreciate America for what it is. If my only experience of America was the one place I lived, I probably wouldn’t like America as much as I do.
I’m soooo interested in driving from Florida to Alaska. I might do it next year.
As a Floridian, people from the Pacific Northwest might as well be foreigners to me. They are just very different from what I’m used to interacting with. They’re usually chill, accepting, quite socially conscious, into peculiar hobbies, and wear a lot of black. That’s uncommon here.
There’s dozens of us out in the fields, dozens of us!
I once made a trip out west (I live near the East Coast) towards Yellowstone National Park. Some of the sights I saw were almost surreal.
Lol try Belgium, where driving 20 minutes is a different dialect and 1-2 hours is a different language.
In LA you have just completed your commute to and from work on a tuesday
And yet high-speed rail is a foreign concept
I’d kill for public transport. No kidding, point me in a direction.
(Jk)
Start by linking a city in Mexico with a smaller city in the US. The cities will prosper and other cities want to be connected.
Don’t forget that local public transport is needed or you need parking space for many cheap rental cars next to the stations until self-driving cars are available.
Tijuana - San Diego
That’s actually brilliant.
e: Is Canada already doing this? Iisn’t there public transport between Windsor and Detroit? I’m going to look into that.
Please drop a quick note about your results.
I would expect that the high in high-speed rail is necessary. Otherwise it’s not a connection of economically distinct zones. Additionally the economies are more similar so that there are fewer reasons for travel.
Yesterday I drove 4 hours and went from northern Minnesota to slightly-less-northern Minnesota.
So Grand Forks to Grand Rapids or there abouts eh?
Just about, yeah. Good ol’ route 2.
Weird. It takes 6-7 hours to go from Minneapolis to the Canadian border… So would you have been driving like Arrowhead to Morehead on back roads?
Twice? There’s at least four distinct accents between my house in north east London and my job in the south east of the city.
Tbf going from north east londin to south east london is like a 4 hour trip
someone’s going to bring up the Elizabeth line and I’m going to shit myself in rage
Is the Elizabeth line a subway line? Cause my British friends claim that the surface rails are shit, but “the tube” is pretty fast.
Am American, so we pretend to have railways.
most of the tube is technically above ground
just when you’re in London everyone loves to bring it up because it’s the newest line
I think you should get a practice shit in so you’re ready.
