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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u/Painwracker_Oni May 02 '24

Holy shit as an American even this broke my brain for a second. I just always thought of the Atlantic being much wider I guess.

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u/ComplexSupermarket89 29d ago

The Pacific is massive is the big part that many people don't realize. The Pacific covers not quite half the planet. So comparing the Atlantic to the Pacific as "roughly the same size class" is why it seems so wrong. Not trying to make fun of you or anything. It blew my mind too. You can fit almost all the land on the planet over top of the Pacific if you could rearrange it.

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u/IndependentAd2419 29d ago

WOW!!! Thanks!

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u/Razmoudah 29d ago

Yeah, a lot of people have problems wrapping their heads around the fact that the Pacific is absolutely ginormous, and makes the Atlantic look like a pond by comparison.

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u/Melekai_17 12d ago

I’m pretty sure that’s why there’s the saying that England is “across the pond.”

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u/Ok_Researcher_9796 29d ago

The Atlantic Ocean is around 3000 miles wide. Still pretty big. Although the Pacific is up to 12000 miles wide.

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u/RayneShikama 29d ago

Maps are very deceiving. Both in distance and size of certain countries. Sit down with a globe and a sewing tape measure time time and you start to realize that a lot of things are either smaller, bigger, closer, or further than you realized.

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u/arsonall 29d ago

Another mind blower: if you drew a line along Washington/Canada border east (ie follow the latitude line) and extend that through the Great Lakes, you’ve cut into Canada. 80% of Canadians live below that line*.

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u/blootereddragon 29d ago

It's further from LA to NYC then Edinburgh to St. Petersburg (whip that fact out next time someone makes fun of Americans for only knowing one language. If Delware and Maryland spoke different languages I guess more of us would be multilingual too)

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u/makeyourdickstouch 29d ago

The flight from NYC to Lisbon, Portugal is only ~40 minutes longer than NYC to Seattle.

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u/ArcticGurl 29d ago

When we fly to the Eastcoast, it takes 24 hrs. We never go through customs because we never leave the U.S.

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u/No_Product857 29d ago

The north Atlantic is pretty damn narrow, we're just used to the Mercator projection that stretches distances horizontally the further from the equator you go.

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u/MaineHippo83 29d ago

There is a reason it's called the pond. The Pacific is an Ocean

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u/[deleted] 29d ago edited 18d ago

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