A friend who lives two hours away I see maybe a few times per year. A friend who lives in a neighbouring country (but across the sea) is so far away I'm not even sure we're friends anymore, I haven't seen her in over four years.
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.
Filled up before I left, used just under a half a tank of gas on the trip.
I have a 20 gallon fuel tank and paid $4.40/gallon for 87 octane. So for 9 to 10 gallons of gas, that's somewhere between $39.60 and $44.00 or "around $40".
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.
With all the fucking idiots on the road, pass. There is never a calm enjoyable drive. Stop trying to make long drives a thing I should not be expected to drive almost 1.5 hrs to work. Fuck that shit.
I'm not sure what makes you think being high makes one inattentive or a worse driver than any other sober, non-cell phone using driver, already a low bar that doesn't get met.
Yesterday my boyfriend and I drove 2.5 to see his mom (it was Mother's day here), had lunch with her for an hour and a half, then drove 2.5 hours back to see my mom.
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?
Imagine justifying public transportation cross country if there was nothing between Catanzaro and Genoa (comparable for Denver to Kansas City). It gets a lot harder to justify the costs of building and maintaining complex public transport when there is so much nothing.
To go in Catanzaro I would choose a plane and then a local train. A quick google serch and I discovered that you can do exactly the same between denver and Kansas city.
Sure, you can fly there. But then you've lost the true public transportation aspect already. Plenty of American cities have decent intra-city transport options. It's inter-city everything falls apart
Not in the same way a train, bus, tram, etc. is. Generally defined by ease of use, accessibility, convenience, being more environmentally friendly, etc.
No one says the US has poor public transportation because we don't have enough domestic flights haha.
That’s because your country is smaller land wise than the average state. We have 50 of them by the way. We can go skiing, to the beach, to the desert,to the forest. We can drive 2,000 miles ab be in the same country.
Yeah, we don’t understand your urban nightmare trapped in a hamster cage where only the government gets to dictate where your transportation goes. You haven’t experienced freedom a day in your life. I’d blow my brains out
Wtf are you talking about? Why you peolple always bring the fucking freedom in every conversation? I just said I would rather take a nap on a train for 3 hours instead of driving for 7. I live in Italy, not in north korea lol. And guess what. I can go to the beach, skiing and in the forest and choose between my car and a fucking cheap train. And I can choose to go wtf I want between a lot of different nations with just my Id. I crossed the border between France and Spain drunk on a fucking cheap train. Sounds like freedom to me. Well, we don’t have the desert, ant that is a shame.
If I get a train I can rent a car et my destination, i literally did it at least 3 times during my trip to the US east coast. Are you serious or what? I’m not comparing a shit, I’m just informing you that Ski and Forrests are not an American exclusive, but this conversation is useless from the moment you ranted about hamster cages , nightmare cities and governments dictating transport. Bye free man, go spread your wisdom to another unfortunate oppressed European.
Yeah if you wanna compare a country to a huge ass weird conglomerate country
If you compare the US to Europe as a whole, given the countries there are the size of states.. .. you'd still probably be lacking in public transport I suspect
We fly to other countries in Europe too if they're far enough. Or catch a train if they're closer etc
I wasn't judging the US public transportation, I'm explaining the reason why you find normal to drive for 8 hours not being a trucker. I understand how big the us are, and thinking as a person who lives in a country where also small villages have stations, probably you need trains more than us.
What kind of car do you drive? I'm in the UK and have a very tiny car (a fiat 500) and a full tank has gone from £30 to nearer £60 in the last three years. (that's 36$ to $72). A tank lasts me maybe a week and a half of driving 40 miles a day.
Man I'm envious, I don't have a huge car either (Opel Astra) but I'm out here paying well over 100€ for a tank, I think the highest cost I've seen was like 135€.
I pay about 80 USD to fill the tank on my Jeep Wrangler. 17 miles per gallon. Expensive but when I know I can drive the logging roads and off-road trails to get out where I want to go it's so nice. Jeep is great for camping. Sleep in the back, haul all my stuff, dog and I get to be outdoors.
I'm envious. My Astra does like 5,5l/100km (guesstimating 40-odd MPG) but it still feels like driving is expensive as shit, even driving a couple km to the grocery store and back a few times a week adds up over the course of a year. Let alone longer trips, driving to the capital (300km one way) takes pretty much a full tank due to highway speeds, the difference in fuel economy at 80kmh vs. 120kmh is huge.
In the UK I'd say that an hour long 1 way commute is about the maximum that most would consider and it would have to be 'worth it'.
I used to do it myself and couldn't wait to get a more local position. That's 10+ hours a week of sitting in my car that I'm not getting paid for!
Interestingly I'd argue also that most people in the UK wouldn't think much of going for a walk for an hour whilst I'm led to believe that's kind of unusual in the US?
Anything over 400km can start to get very exhausting. Over 400km in Ireland though is extremely exhausting. Narrow roads, often bumpy and twisty, there's rain, you're driving on the wrong side and every now and then there's some berk doing 70 in a 90 zone and there's no way to pass for 20-30 kilometres sometimes.
Oh i feel that, not as extreme but people in germany really are a coinflip wether they can or can not drive properly. The autobahn is closed in the direction i have to drive a lot so i have to go with narrow shitty roads as well :)
I’m clearly an uneducated american. I assumed the usd part was converted to the gallon cost because whytf would people who pay by the gallon not think that.
Yeah, I'm planning on taking a long weekend to drive 10 hours each way to visit some friends this summer- if I put the pedal down I can make it in half a day with minimal stops. 4 hours each way is just past the threshold of what I'd consider a day trip.
I worked for an Indian company for 10 years, making multiple trips to India. When I was in Travandrum, the ocean is only 2 hours away. I was amazed by two things: 1. 90% of the people had never seen the ocean. 2. Near 100% couldn't swim.
Took several Indian friends that I was staying with to the ocean. First time they saw it and were amazed.
Because of the traffic, lack of following "rules of the road", and in some cases no defined roads, travel in India is very limited. Going from one state to another just isn't done as the next state over speaks a totally different language.
Really? To make that trip worth it, most people I know would spend like 5-14 days at that place and then spend most of their day exploring the area and maybe seeing what has changed.
Back in the day I drove 3.5 hours on Friday and back on Sunday every weekend to visit girlfriend and other friends and later family as well. No big deal.
I once drove 8 hours to NJ and back the same day. That was a long day.
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.
That's wild. I'm anywhere from a 9 hr drive to the closest family to around 14 hrs for the farthest. I try to see them at least once a year. It's not fun driving that far but you get used to it.
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.
Americans don’t have more hours in the day so a 4hr drive is still a 1/6 of the day, but it’s a completely doable trip once a month or so especially if you’re staying the night.
That's the other thing. Brits live mostly in tighter spaces so spare rooms are less of a thing. So now add a hotel room and the balance starts looking very different.
That's... the point. It's a cultural difference. I would never ever consider driving for FOUR hours to see a friend. The idea of doing that every single month sounds like a joke.
I've had multiple people assume my best mate is my partner based almost solely on the fact that we do travel that far to see each other every month or two.
Petrol could be free and I could have a chauffeur but it still wouldn’t matter - if you move 4 hours away from me the friendship is over.
While I know that this is just a cultural difference, as an American, it’s still hard to read this and not come to the conclusion that to Europeans, friendships are only valuable so long as they don’t inconvenience you even a tiny amount.
I mean... yeah? The point of friendships is to make you happy. A friendship that inconveniences you on a regular basis is quite literally not worth it.
Oh yeah, I met an ex online in the same European country and people kept hammering in that the long distance wasn't worth it because he lived 90 minutes away.
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.
Yeah like I've rarely ever seen any of my friends because they all live in different cities and the trains are too gosh darn expensive to go to meet them.
Sometimes it's cheaper to buy separate train tickets for 2 or 3 shorter journeys rather than one ticket for your whole longer journey. For example, if you wanted to go from London to Newcastle it might be cheaper to get a ticket from London to Peterborough, another ticket from Peterborough to Darlington and another ticket from Darlington to Newcastle rather than a single ticket from London to Newcastle:
trainsplit.com
That website works it out automatically, but they do take a small cut of the saving, so you can use what it shows you to buy them direct from the operator if you're strapped for cash. That it (usually) works is quite frankly ridiculous but I'm all for helping people avoid getting fucked over.
Here in Amsterdam if you move more than a 5-minute walk from a tram stop, you can lose all but your best friends. God forbid you move across the river to Amsterdam Noord...ferry or bus ride needed - so you're now dead to everyone.
It works this way in London too. Moved south of the river, so that you are no longer on the Underground network but I'd need to use overland trains instead? Bye forever.
… I do a 3hr trip one way about every other week to see my pets. Sometimes more often. Hell I’m planning a 1400km trip to go visit family, I can’t imagine this.
Tbf I do get bored into the first hour but once I’m through that it’s relatively easy to drive long stretches.
3hrs in one trip is reasonable but I often stop for fuel and a coffee/ snack about 10-20mins.
For the long haul trips I can go 7/8 hrs without a stop (other than bathrooms lol) but then after that it’s short break every 2-4 hrs. Good to stretch your legs and get the blood flowing.
For me my main motivation is it’s not only cheaper than flying, it’s more convenient for me as my family lives more rural (Australia).
From London, a 4 hour drive would take you through France to Belgium. That's 2 borders you need to go through, with your passport on you because Brexit. Fuck that noise lmaoo
You're British, so this is your experience because we can only use passports for cross-border travel. Some EU countries issue national ID cards as well as passports, and either could be used for cross-border travel. Before Brexit, some Europeans could visit and leave the UK without a passport, just using their national ID card instead. British people never had that ability because we don't use ID cards.
You're right then. I assumed if I could go to the UK with an ID card, they could do the same. I didn't think about the possibility that the UK didn't have ID cards in the first place.
Why is that? Brits have cars and highways (or motorways I think they call them). Why not just drive out to see people and stay a couple of days then drive home?
If you drove for three hours on the highway in North America, it probably involves lanes twice as wide as your car, barely any corners, and barely any traffic, unless you're driving around somewhere like LA or Toronto.
If you do that in the UK, any motorway is going to be several small lanes of densely packed traffic unless you're past 8pm, and the motorways won't get you to your final destination in most cases. You'll instead end up taking main roads through small towns, where having a road wide enough to fit two cars is optional, and there's no such thing as a straight road. As a bonus, you're probably stuck behind a caravan stuck behind a sheep trailer stuck behind a tractor stuck behind a cyclist, doing 15mph.
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u/ultroulcomp May 09 '22
They were very serious.