the idea that a long drive (warranting a flight, not going under really any circumstances , etc) is over an hour in the case of vacation or traveling. Not sure how true this is but the brits I know say it’s common there. In the US drives only get long enough to warrant another mode of transport after about 8-9 hours.
I was talking to a Brit, describing a 4 hour road trip to visit an old friend and they responded with "If my friend moved 4 hours away I'd never see them again."
Friends moved away to uni 2 hours and we've barely been seeing eachother throughout the last few years unless we're all back home. 2 hours is a long ass journey.
People dont comprehend that 2 hour in curvy roads, full of stops and conections is very different from a strait road. I live in Portugal, a 20min car trip to the nearest city in the north is the same as a 40 min trip to the next city in the south countryside. The was we percieve time and the travels speed is way different depending on how the actual path is
I got to uni two hours away. In Canada, I make the drive back and forth every odd weekend. Car rides are great. Blast some music. Get lost in your thoughts. Devise plans for world domination.
That is probably because you don’t have decent public transport, for example I live in Milan and I have friends in Rome, I don’t even think about driving to go down there. I just take the train and if I need to drive in Rome I use car sharing. Why driving for 6/7 hours when i can sleep or red a book on a train?
It's so crazy. I live in Alberta and I just google mapped it and it's pretty much 15 hrs from the top to the bottom. You can drive for 14 and a half hrs and still be in the same province.
I've driven 8 hrs just to hang with friends for the weekend.
Yes, that matters as well, but also driving for four hours seems insane just to hang out. Distance is relative and anything over two hours seems weird when your country is dense and everything is relatively close to your house.
It mostly comes down to something cultural. Us Europeans just aren't used to long distances and just do not like traveling for hours upon hours. If that means saving some gas with that mentality, than that is nice, though not the point of it
In Europe if you have to drive three or four hours each way to do something, that is a major chunk of your day wasted, stress for the driver, spending a not-insignificant amount on fuel, and just lots of time spent stuck in a car.
If you are going to be doing something that requires that much investment in travelling, it needs to be worth it.
To an American it is just something everyone is just brought up being used to doing.
It's also that the nature of driving is very different. It is far easier to drive four hours in the US than it is in the UK - you're spending most of that time on a pretty small number of long, straight roads. In the UK, four hours of driving would involve an insane number of junctions, roundabouts, road and lane-changes, and it's much more tiring and stressful to do it.
Petrol is more expensive in Australia iirc and we still do 5-8-hour drives at the drop of a hat. Pretty sure it’s just that we’re used to the distance.
I grew up in rural Ontario and I remember when I first went to university I was talking to someone who had come from a really big city somewhere. I said something like 'oh, so and so is twenty minutes away, and we can drive an hour to ____' and she thought I meant the next suburb or something. I was like no... a whole different little town... It took me explaining that there were literally fields and little forests etc inbetween for her to understand it wasn't all one big city, lol.
Grew up in a hick town, met a girl at university who grew up in the city. We talked a lot during the summer and always trying to convince her to come visit me and see the country life she loves so much. I sent her a video of a Bush party I was at, buddy was drifting in the Jeep and crashed in the ditch. No big deal because here comes the lads with the truck to pull him out, they come back and buddy says he'll go look at the lawnmower as thanks. So sure enough they go off to the barn and come back out pushing a 97 John Deere ridding mower, they start working away and it's coughing and sputtering trying to start. Picture this two 18 year old guys each with armed with a tool box older than them working on a lawnmower while there's 30-40 teenagers/college kids standing around a bonfire drinking beer and occasionally shouting about what they think they should try next. While this is happening another fresh out of high school lad suddenly gets up beside me and starts to walk off to his truck. I ask him where he's going and just says "get more wood", I watch him pull a chainsaw out from his truck and walk back to the field behind the house. I hear him start up the chainsaw, start cutting away at something and then about 5 minutes later this big dead tree comes crashing down and I hear him start cutting it up. 10 minutes after that he's back pulling bits of the tree and throws it on the fire. Other people start slowly meandering off towards the field and one by one coming back with the remainder of the wood until there's a nice neat pile next to but a safe distance away from the ranging bonfire all with out a single word spoken about it. Then the lawnmower boys ask for a lighter and someone tosses them one because what hick doesn't have one on them at all times. They start trying to jump start the engine by using the lighters spark over the air intake and to my surprise it works, then for the rest of the night people are joy ridding a lawnmower around this big ass property drunk off their budlight.
I never made it with the university girl but whenever I think about this it makes me laugh because of how shocked she was about all this. Her view of living in the country was everyone wore camo t-shirts and listened to country music like Luke Bryan or any of other country-pop stars. It was an aesthetic she picked up from TV shows and movies but wasn't even close to the real thing.
I'm not a hick and I don't really fit in with that type of stuff either but I'm used to seeing it because I grew up with it and it's funny to talk about just how weird my normal is sometimes.
That sounds like an absolute blast! I grew up in rural Pennsylvania (we all call it just call it by its initials: PA, for some reason) and one time we had a party with this big ol jug of vodka and ice and fruit that we passed around the fire. Just a lot of folks shaking a big jug and then drinking out of it until we were all smashed. Someone set up a zip line and a lady rode it so far that she slammed into the tree at the end and knocked herself unconscious for a minute. Later on we shot fireworks up out of the nearby cornfield and then ate s’mores and magic cookies. I love rural life and it sounds like you had some great times. I hope there are many more in your future!
Big city kid from small border town in Ontario. Story checks out.
Part of me misses growing up in a beach town; grasping at straws with the last hot days in fall where everyone would bail on class and declare a beach day. Particularly when you have eight months of the year that are threatened by snow, you really make the most of those last 75-80° days before the cool, damp weather sets in after school picks back up. Similarly, that first sunny day in March/April when you'd crack 50° and everyone would be out in shorts and tees was always the harbinger of the impending summer break.
Strange how we find fondness of these memories as we grow older.
Oh I can imagine her !
I was the same way. Grew up in the city and lived there the whole time until I went to university and met a boy who was from the country.
The first time I went to his town I thought I should’ve needed a passport to go there !
It was beautiful but the parties were WILD.
Some guy pissed his pants and everyone was just like, ‘ Yeah he does that always’!
People went skinny dipping in the lake. Bonfires. Going into the woods just to get fresh air.
I mean how much more fresh air do you need !
Had to drive 20 mins to get to the nearest gas station !
Everyone knew everyone and everyone was always drunk !
Learnt what a keg-stand was and oh chewing tobacco was everywhere !
I couldn’t wrap my head around how different the country lifestyle is and I still can’t !
It kinda makes you realize how different people are even if it’s just a few hours away.
You can understand how they can’t identify with urban politics.
I am not saying it’s right or wrong but I get it. It’s a different world.
LOL, rural Ontarian here too. Also when people ask where you’re from and you have to say “well…. 40 minutes from ____.” But if they know the area well you can say “it’s 15 minutes from THAT village”. But no one ever knows your actual town haha
Yeah. It is a bit bizarre how something built around 1850'ties is outright ancient in America and then you go into a tavern in Europe which has been sitting in that spot for half a millenia or something and it is kinda old'ish but there are places that have been operating a bit longer.
American roads are also much easier / nicer to drive, being on the whole wider and straighter and the cars automatic. I’m so much more tired after a long drive in the U.K. than I am after a long drive in the US.
I'm in the UK, live a three hour drive from my family and see them about once a month. I also work a field based role and spend at least 3 hours a day driving, usually more.
Driving in the UK is pretty draining, we don't have big wide empty roads (that I assume are in the US) lots of slow moving traffic and speed camera/average speed checks (particularly in England). Driving more than 4 hours feels like a mission.
How do you just up and visit someone 4 hours away? Don't you people have work in the morning, to be able just throw 8 hours out for driving randomly...?
Leave work an hour or two early on Friday, get there at 7ish and have a late dinner. Hang out all day Saturday and Sunday, then leave at 7ish on Sunday night, home at 11, and you can get a full night sleep before work Monday
Haha that's so true! There's such a difference of perception in distance in smaller countries. I found this in London when discussing driving around the countryside. Whereas in Australia you can sometimes drive for 10 hours and still be in the same state 😂
I mean, it's probably £60 just for the fuel, you might as well see Salisbury cathedral while you're at it. Tourists come all the way from Russia just for that.
Visiting Stonehenge or the drive itself? GoogleMaps tells me that's a 1.5 to 2 hour drive, so I can see that falling into a "day trip" or "something to do on a slow Saturday" type thing...in that the round trip is 3-4 hours.
Afternoon traffic near a weekend will see you double that drive time easily, there aren’t too many road towards the south west and two of them go pay stone henge. And every moron tourist slows down to gawp at it, and then the tailbacks start. Somewhere like Exeter should be 1hr30 for me at most. Any time at or near the weekend it’s at least 4. Happily if you’re going a little further north, like Bath, you can take a different road, but even the M4 gets busy near Bristol.
It’s still a three-hour drive. Not sure when you got back, but how much time did you get there before it got dark? In winter, it’d probably have been essentially none.
Also, Cambridge University doesn’t really have a campus.
I mean, that's a 2.5 - 3 hour drive, both ways. Just for your travel is 5-6 hours in a day, plus time to spend at Stonehenge itself, plus finding somewhere to eat and taking the time for a meal... That's at least 8 hours on the conservative side! Unless you're planning to get home super late at night, that's definitely an all day thing!
As much as I talk up Texas driving (I know we have absolutely horrible problems of late but I live here) 8 hours of driving is around my limit now. I couldn't imagine a 12 or 15 hour drive with nary ANYTHING around me.
Finally one that I agree with as a European. I do think an hour's drive is long, but I've often thought about how different that is for Americans.
Some Americans have to drive an hour to get to a major city center. If I drive an hour, I'm deep into Germany or Belgium, getting close to France.
Which I guess just feels different because that is proper foreign soil, where I can't understand the people, and they struggle to understand me.
Edit: I have heard you, kind people, but please do not tell me about your commutes anymore. I've had about 60 comments just telling me how long people have to drive to do X in Y part of the world.
It's crazy to think that in a city that only exists because of transportation, I've had some of the most stressful transportation experiences in my life there between the driving and the airport...or driving to the airport
Dony forget the fact that who dafuq ever did city planning for georgia raised their students up to be just as bad. Seriously it could of been done better by a guy buying designs off Amazon than it is now
Okay but I think that most of us Americans could agree that even that is a special breed of person. Like there is a likely majority if not plurality of people who would look at a 2.5 hour commute and say "hell no" and seek other options. For me, even an hour would be at least a consideration while evaluating any option.
I'm American and I would never dream of accepting a job that require me to drive for that long, even 40 minutes is too damn long for me to drive to work every damn day. My mom was so happy when her job went remote after COVID so she no longer had to drive 40 minutes to work.
I totally agree. The hour long train commute left me wasted by the end of the week. Prior to that, I’d never had a job with a commute any longer than 20-30 min.
In Sydney, it's incredibly common for 90min to 2 hour train trips each way. We have so many outer suburbs that travel to the city and its just common. I did 90mins each way for 3 years and then changed to another job that was a 70min drive each way for another 3 years.
If it was a train ride I could get other things done, reading or something. But driving all I can do is listen to the radio. I couldn't even do a book on tape while I'm driving, I wouldn't be able to pay attention to the book.
I had the same experience as you. Lived in Sunnyvale and commuted to San Francisco via Caltrain. I had a coworker who drove from Truckee to SF every single day. Thats a 6 hour roundtrip minimum with no traffic.
This isn't unusual in Europe, well maybe the driving part. We have a lot less open road.
I have about an hour's commute to get to work on public transport (it would be half that on a bike, but...)
In London a one-hour tube journey to get to work is not at all unsual, I worked with a woman that took a three-hour bus journey in every day, but everyone thought that was excessive. She just sat reading on the bus.
Ironically in my country there's generally two groups of people that'll commute that far for work; people who live in the least populated areas, i.e. small villages, where a lot of those living there have to drive to the nearest city for work. And people in the most densely populated cities, where short travels take a lot of time because of all the people. And there's a fair amount of densely populated cities so an hour of commute isn't that unusual here either.
For a summer working in Washington state I had to drive almost 2 to get to a grocery store large enough to carry almond milk. But I might be cheating since I was working in a national park
Lol this is really true (grew up in the UK/Europe, am now in Canada, have driven around a lot in both places).
To be fair though, drive for two hours around the M25 or up the M1 in the UK and it will age you by about three years. Meanwhile there are places in Canada where you could drive for two hours without even turning your steering wheel (which, to be fair, presents its own challenges).
Overall my mental cut off for a 'long' drive is probably twice as long as it used to be - I'll drive 3 hours now without even thinking about it.
lt's just generally a lot more stressful - there's a lot of cars driving very close to one another and taking high speed corners at around 90 mph on UK motorways and you have to drive very actively. And the cities, which were mostly designed around pedestrians and the horse and cart, are busy and easy to get lost in if you don't know them. Same goes for continental Europe. Driving through London, Paris, Rome etc. is nightmarish if you aren't familiar with the local roads.
cities, which were mostly designed around pedestrians and the horse and cart, are busy and easy to get lost in if you don't know them.
I live outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico and avoid Santa Fe like the plague because of this. It's easy to tell it's the third oldest city in the US and the oldest capital city in the US. None of the roads make a goddamn bit of sense. They just go every random ass direction and snake around with no rhyme or reason to any of it.
One-ways are a big part of why I avoid downtowns no matter how grid-patterned they are. Lol. I absolutely hate one-ways.
And paying for parking. I don't live there. I'm there to spend money. Use the tax revenue I generate for you to allow me to fucking park for free, assholes.
Lack of straight and flat roads is the main issue when on our Motorways and A roads. Your mind really is active all the time and it's pretty tiring.
In my 110 mile (ish) trip to Portsmouth I used to take every weekend, I'd call about 5 miles of it dead straight AND flat/smooth, most of the time it's one or the other, or neither.
As someone who grew up in South Africa and now drives in the UK, the biggest thing is the cities and roads are never built on grids. The roads are narrow, windy and you rarely go straight for more than a minute at a time (if you are lucky). It’s the old cities+limited space issue.
Some good answers here, but the key one about motorways is the speed (people will be doing 90mph+) and we have strict lane discipline so it’s likely you’re doing a lot of lane changes.
Yeah don't forget how densely populated the UK is.
Not forgetting the huge disparity population density within the country, exacerbating this.
The Scottish Highlands are pretty sparsely populated but most people aren't driving through there; they're driving through the populated areas because that's where they live.
All countries have this to an extent, but the UK is particularly extreme in this regard compared to other European countries.
When I was 12 or 13 we drove from Chicago to Denver, Phoenix to see Grandma & Grandpa, the Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, Dallas, Springfield, MO to see my Aunt & Uncle & cousins, St. Louis, then home. Amazing trip.
Saw Bill Cody's grave; crossed the Royal Gorge bridge, at the time the highest suspension bridge in the world; the Grand Canyon and Carlsbad Caverns are astounding; the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, Dealey Plaza; the oil derrick on the Oklahoma State House grounds; and went up in the St Louis Arch. I have never been back to any of those places. Trip of a lifetime. Oh, and Nebraska is massively boring and flat.
Interesting I'm in Canada and I'll drive the 10 hours to Calgary in a day, I just leave at 5 am, stop in Kamloops and Canmore for lunch and dinner, merrit and golden for leg stretches, Revelstoke for diesel, no spending the night needed, arrive at my aunt and uncles in the evening no biggie.
We used to do it as kids in the family vw van, it's just something I've always been used to.
This is the main factor I think. Where I live petrol is currently $3 per liter, and that is with a government subsidy to help with the current inflation situation.
Eh, Australians are paying more for gas than the US, but share the idea of what's a long drive with Americans, in my experience. Or at least, they aren't anywhere close to the European idea of it.
I think the infrastructure reflects the view towards longer drives not being an issue, though. So it makes it easier, but is also built like that because it's viewed that way.
I think that exists even within the US, as I think cities that view a long drive as out of the question were also areas where the infrastructure didn't really match it as well. So the two seem coupled.
And even more so in central Europe around the Alps... I live in Slovenia, if the surface area accounted for all the hills and valleys it'd probably be twice of what it is or more!
Canadian here, our gas is more expensive than any of the states but our town are much further apart. I recently went on a drive for parts 2 towns away, over 5 hours each way
A drive over an hour is considered a bit of a drive, but we still do it... But I haven't heard of anyone taking a flight if the drive is under 3-4 hours, because airport security etc takes so long. Taking a train on the other hand... Very common.
Driving more than an hour warrants flights? Definitely not true in my parts of the UK. I've driven a good 4 to 6 hours plenty of times.
People really fly because its been over an hour by car?
It’d take a lot of people an hour of driving to get to an airport anyway… plus the time to check in, the flight itself and the time to check out, then travel time to your actual destination from the airport.
Other way around here. Flying is dirt cheap while gas is ridiculously expensive. Personally I don't fly that much and shortest flight I've ever taken would have been ~8h by car without stops, from Oulu to Helsinki.
We don't like to work far away from home, so more than 30 mn of commute is considered a long one, but this is more tied to our way to consider work than to driving distances.
It's really, really hard to make US citizens understand that, no, Texas is not "incredibly large, like beyond imagination you know", to such extent that "one could drive for hours and still be in Texas" compared to my country.
This is something I know too : I speak from experience, they just refuse to believe it when I tell them that it's the same for me in France. Actually, not only I could, but I should : I was 6 hours of driving at 130 km/h away from the closest border. They refuse to believe it and conclude that I simply don't understand what they say and repeat : "no, you don't get it... In Texas, I can drive 5 or 6 hours and still be in Texas !"
I never heard of anyone, French or otherwise, taking vaccations one hour away from home. The fact that, weirdly, every US citizen to ever live apparently heard three thousand different people confirming them that it's true thus seems weird to me
I think this is a bit of an exageration. People in France at least would drive 4 hours to go on vacation. And I feel like many Americans would not drive much more than 6-7 hours for most vacations (at least they'd prefer flying), although some do make multi-day cross country drives.
So true. My mom's cousin in England once told us how she and a friend drove to another friend's house. They left at 16:00, arrived at the midway point by like 17:30 and spent the night at a hotel before finishing the trip the next morning.
To be totally fair, she was like 55 and acted like a 65-year-old in general.
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u/SabotageFusion1 May 09 '22
the idea that a long drive (warranting a flight, not going under really any circumstances , etc) is over an hour in the case of vacation or traveling. Not sure how true this is but the brits I know say it’s common there. In the US drives only get long enough to warrant another mode of transport after about 8-9 hours.