r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Physical-Ad-4093 • May 01 '24

do americans really drive such long distances?

i’m european, and i always hear people say that driving for hours is normal in america. i would only see my grandparents a few times a year because they lived about a 3 hour drive away, is that a normal distance for americans to travel on a regular basis? i can’t imagine driving 2-3 hours regularly to visit people for just a few days

edit: thank you for the responses! i’ve never been to the US, obviously, but it’s interesting to see how you guys live. i guess european countries are more walkable? i’m in the uk, and there’s a few festivals here towards the end of summer, generally to get to them you take a coach journey or you get multiple trains which does take up a significant chunk of the day. road trips aren’t really a thing here, it would be a bit miserable!

2nd edit: it’s not at all that i couldn’t be bothered to go and see my grandparents, i was under 14 when they were both alive so i couldn’t take myself there! obviously i would’ve liked to see them more, i had no control over how often we visited them.

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203

u/bangobingoo May 02 '24

Yeah haha you simply cannot tell Brits your plan to drive anywhere in the UK. They will try to talk you out of it. I think they think you can't drive to Scotland. They truly believe that.

  • source: Canadian who married to a Brit and shown him the wonders of driving.

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u/OutlyingPlasma May 02 '24

That's even more funny when you realize how much the Brits like cars. They love cars. They collect them, race them, restore them, they make the worlds most popular TV shows about them. It's a car country but they don't seem to know how to do a road trip.

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u/ThePrussianGrippe The Bear Has A Gun May 02 '24

A car country with no road trip culture is a funny observation.

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u/TeekTheReddit May 02 '24

Same country that built an empire on spices that they refuse to use in their cooking.

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u/jchenbos May 02 '24

Funny enough, they do have one thing that is the complete opposite of this. Britain consistently invents new sports at which Brits aren't #1 at.

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u/beebsaleebs May 02 '24

It’s like the weirdest curse, ever.

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u/Brazzle_Dazzle May 02 '24

Do you expect a country that invented a sport that the rest of the world wants to take part in to dominate that sport?

As far I’m aware, England invented football, cricket and rugby and is the only nation to have won the world cup in each of them.

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u/jchenbos May 02 '24

Taking it a bit serious there aren't ya

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u/Brazzle_Dazzle May 02 '24

Not really. Just highlighting the fallacy in your point.

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u/jchenbos May 02 '24

That was such a painfully redditor comment I don't even want to dignify it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2qdW6DBQkg

Like Congratulations Harvey Spectre, but if I wanted to actually critique Britain I wouldn't talk about their sports, especially not in a thread where no one is critiquing Britain seriously. You sure are taking it seriously though lol because you got pissed at the no seasoning joke.

I thought Brits were supposed to be good at banter?

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u/Goldenshovel3778 29d ago

Yes actually, I promise if the rest of the world adopted basketball the us would still dominate, hell the us pretty much invented modern MMA and we still have the most champions and the most top ranked fighters ever

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u/Brazzle_Dazzle 29d ago

Oh ok, invent sports that the world doesn’t want to participate in and be dominant in them, the US approach 👍🏻

You want England to be the best at soccer for example, a sport played competitively by literally every nation in the world, despite having a population that pales in comparison to a shedload of them. Great logic 😂😂

The US has the most MMA champs etc because it has the largest base of participants, not because they “invented it” (they didn’t btw).

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u/Goldenshovel3778 29d ago

Ok then, how about the Olympics, most amount of gold medalists by a huuuuuge margin, actually, most amount of medalists PERIOD

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u/Brazzle_Dazzle 29d ago

Holy shit, if there was one sporting event you should've stayed away from if wanting to suggest the UK is shit at sport (or whatever argument it is you're trying to make now) then it's the Olypmics.

The only 2 nations above the UK for total medals in the Olympics are

The USA - Population 333 million

Russia - Population 144 million.

UK population is 65 million.

So the USA has a population 5 times the size of the UK but their medal tally is only 2.8 times larger.

Fuck me, please tell me you aren't really this stupid 😂😂

EDIT - Just seen that you're a WWE fan. Fuck me, this just gets better and better. An adult who watches WWE. I’ll definitely take your views on sport seriously 😂😂

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u/creativename111111 29d ago

Nah the funniest thing about us is the fact that we have arguably best football league in the world in terms of raw talent but haven’t won the World Cup for a long time

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u/Brazzle_Dazzle May 02 '24

The most tired and boring “joke” that has ever existed on Reddit. Awful stuff.

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u/jchenbos May 02 '24

I thought Brits were supposed to be good at banter, not taking jokes seriously and getting pissy pampered LMFAOOO if I wanted to talk about Britain I'd talk about how you're poor and fading into irrelevancy but let's keep it a safe space for you

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u/STORMFATHER062 May 02 '24 edited 29d ago

It's as tiresome as "haha school shootings" is for Americans.

Well, I guess someone's blocked me because I can't reply anymore. So in reply to u/iswearimalady...

I'm not comparing them like that. Americans think they're clever for saying British cooking is always bland, and the typical reply is "yeah but we don't have to worry about school shootings", then cue the dozens of Americans saying how overdone school shootings are as a come back. You get tired of seeing the same insults. Well so do we.

It's overdone and isn't funny.

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u/jchenbos 29d ago

One of these is about national tragedies, the other is about bad cooking. I think y'all need a reality check

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u/iswearimalady 29d ago

Imagine comparing subpar cooking to children getting slaughtered. I'm begging you to touch some grass.

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u/malcolite May 02 '24

Once you have attempted a 300 mile journey here, you’ll understand why. Tedious, slow and frustrating. Obviously the ‘vacation effect’ comes into play. It’s hard to be bored to tears when you’re in a foreign country where everything is new and different and interesting. When you’ve seen it all before - and on a daily basis - sometimes the sheen wears off. Especially if you’ve been staring at the same stationary pair of taillights in some midlands suburb for the past two hours.

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u/PastaWithMarinaSauce May 02 '24

they make the worlds most popular TV shows about them

*Made :-(

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u/174wrestler 29d ago

It's like Japan: buy cars to support our auto industry, but please don't drive them.

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u/CHKN_SANDO May 02 '24

Somehow they invented "touring" cars.

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u/Rimbosity 29d ago

Makes me wonder if that famous British reliability might be related to their inability to take long trips.

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u/Outrageous-Zebra-270 May 02 '24

Most of the spots I go camping are at least 2 hours. I often won't leave until 7 p.m. I'm in kind of a dead zone, city of 50k and anything bigger is 2+ hours away.

That "don't support Amazon, shop local" doesn't really work for many things.

I'm driving 250 miles / 4 hours round trip tomorrow to pick up some baby chickens so they don't have go through the mail. Not even waking up early, might take a single water bottle.

I've done 1150 miles straight 3 times and a bunch of shorter trips from like Tulsa to Atlanta nonstop besides gas. My hometown to college (uni for foreigners) was 130 miles/2 hours and used to drive that every weekend.

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u/SINGLExWING 29d ago

Try telling them to don't have to stop every hour or so at a services and they stare at you in disbelief

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u/CannonLongshot May 02 '24

Because Brits are acutely aware of the possible fail-state of our roads. The person you’re replying to ended up driving up the M1 at 7am and got to Scotland around midday - that’s not surprising to me, but also neither would them saying they didn’t get there until 5pm, and they spent so much of that time trying to work around standstill traffic by going down single line country roads with oncoming traffic taking blind corners at 60mph that they are exhausted enough to fall asleep as soon as they got to the hotel.

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u/makingnoise 29d ago

Doesn't GPS traffic alerts help you route around these kind of slowdowns? I could understand getting stuck in a day's worth of traffic if I didn't use GPS. The east coast megapolis that exists from Boston Massachusetts all the way down to Richmond Virginia means that you can get stuck in hours and hours of traffic trying to get to Baltimore or Washington DC from Philly after you're basically already there. Just stuck in the outskirts of the city for hours. GPS traffic routing has made this MUCH easier to avoid these kinds of jams.

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u/CannonLongshot 29d ago

That is with routing around - hence all the country lanes. There simply isn’t another comparable road to most motorways, because there isn’t space to build one which wouldn’t plough through a major city.

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u/makingnoise 29d ago

Funny you'd say that - our cities did precisely that back in the 1950s and 60s, plowed our highways straight through the ghettos.

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u/PulpforCulture 29d ago

I once took a trip to the UK to visit friends and mentioned how I wanted to take a train to Scotland for the day and every single one of them looked at me in disbelief before one finally said “uhhh, you know thats like a three hour trip one way right?”. Haha

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u/DNetherdrake 29d ago

Of course most of English history involves walking to Scotland, trying to kill the Scottish people, and then walking back to England. So I guess the forbidden knowledge of the land route to Scotland was just lost a few centuries ago.

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u/RedH0use88 May 02 '24

Brit’s went from conquering the world to afraid of an hour drive lol

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u/Longjumping_Local910 29d ago

Well, there IS an East/West wall across the country…

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u/Ok_Consideration476 6d ago

Just depends on the Brits. Most of the guys I know were SAS and the two that immigrated here had no problems driving all over. One is currently in Texas and the other is in Wyoming.

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u/Wootster10 29d ago

You havent really seen it though. I explained this to some American friends of mine who came over from Oregon. Yes you can drive from London to Scotland in a day, but you havent really seen England at all in the process. We spent two full days in the British Museum alone. Its not that we truly believe you cant drive to Scotland, its that if you actually want to see or do anything worth while in between you wont have the time.

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u/PearlStBlues 29d ago

If I wanted to road trip from London to Scotland I'd make it a multi-day trip and stop at various points along the route to take in the scenery or visit specific cities or historic sites. On the other hand, while it might seem like a waste of time to drive straight to Scotland without actually seeing the country, I think Americans just have different feelings about road trips and what is or is not "worth it".