This is why Europeans don’t grasp how big the U.S. is. It’s a minimum of 33 hours driving from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Their entire country is a day trip from home.
You do realise when you say stuff like this that Europe, by the conventional understanding of it extending to the Ural Mountains, is still bigger than the US by around 300.000 square kilometres right? Europeans do know how big it is.
„But tourists…“ people don’t have the capacity to comprehend scale in unfamiliar environments. The New Zealand subreddit gets all sorts of nationalities asking if they can do crazy shit like drive from Auckland to Queenstown in a day.
You’d be surprised. So many Europeans (and Americans) think they can do little day trips in Australia to places multiple days of non-stop driving away.
Sure, but so often it’s “Americans are complicit idiots since half the country doesn’t simply protest in the same city” and “dumb car-brained Americans won’t even build highspeed rail between LA and NYC” 🙄
Even smaller-scale things like the definition of rural are so drastically different from places like the UK that they just don’t translate.
The distances and population density differences are huge but simultaneously subtle enough that reasonable-ish sounding yet wildly impractical takes are a common occurrence online.
Most people dont have to drive from new york to los angeles or similar, thats 42 hours, but we have similar distances in europe as well. The longest ive driven was about 30 hours(dont even ask, thats too much even for me) but a friend of mine and their family had to drive down from åre to barcelona which google maps says is 37 hours. I think it took four days for them. Also from where i am right now, kiruna, a very northern city in sweden, is 18 hours away. The lomgest drive in sweden wothout going through another country is 22 hours so the us being larger isnt a very valid argument. If you look at the entirity of europe its larger than the us and the distances are longer but what actually matters is the population density. When comparing the contiguous us and the eu for example the population density is double in the eu while the whole of europe has a population density about 50% higher than the us.
This is why Europeans don’t grasp how big the U.S. is. It’s a minimum of 33 hours driving from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Their entire country is a day trip from home.
You do realise when you say stuff like this that Europe, by the conventional understanding of it extending to the Ural Mountains, is still bigger than the US by around 300.000 square kilometres right? Europeans do know how big it is.
„But tourists…“ people don’t have the capacity to comprehend scale in unfamiliar environments. The New Zealand subreddit gets all sorts of nationalities asking if they can do crazy shit like drive from Auckland to Queenstown in a day.
We do understand that, don’t you worry.
Europeans in America are always like “The Grand Canyon is beautiful! Now let’s drive over to see the Statue of Liberty!”
Just teasing, I love you Europeans
You’d be surprised. So many Europeans (and Americans) think they can do little day trips in Australia to places multiple days of non-stop driving away.
Sure, but so often it’s “Americans are complicit idiots since half the country doesn’t simply protest in the same city” and “dumb car-brained Americans won’t even build highspeed rail between LA and NYC” 🙄
Even smaller-scale things like the definition of rural are so drastically different from places like the UK that they just don’t translate.
The distances and population density differences are huge but simultaneously subtle enough that reasonable-ish sounding yet wildly impractical takes are a common occurrence online.
Most people dont have to drive from new york to los angeles or similar, thats 42 hours, but we have similar distances in europe as well. The longest ive driven was about 30 hours(dont even ask, thats too much even for me) but a friend of mine and their family had to drive down from åre to barcelona which google maps says is 37 hours. I think it took four days for them. Also from where i am right now, kiruna, a very northern city in sweden, is 18 hours away. The lomgest drive in sweden wothout going through another country is 22 hours so the us being larger isnt a very valid argument. If you look at the entirity of europe its larger than the us and the distances are longer but what actually matters is the population density. When comparing the contiguous us and the eu for example the population density is double in the eu while the whole of europe has a population density about 50% higher than the us.
Lisbon to Helsinki takes 47 hours of driving btw.
And you haven’t even reached far North yet, there’s still 1000+ km of Finland remaining.
Yeah but nobody would even consider driving from Lisbon to Helsinki if the goal is just to get from A to B; you’d make that trip by plane.
Yup, but hardly anyone in the US decides to do Atlantic to Pacific road trips either.
Plenty of people in the US do this.
Only because gas was probably cheaper than water, but that changed recently.
Yep. And because people in the US have a weird sense that their time has no value.
Europeans think 200km is a long distance. Americans think 200 years is a long time. /jk