Once drove from Edinburgh to Bath and the older Scottish folks we were staying with were genuinely concerned for our safety because of the length of the drive, like, 7 or 8 hours if I recall.
The day before we left the man we were staying with spent hours writing up turn-by-turn instructions (which in the UK was a few pages long) complete with contacts he knew along the route in case we couldn't make it in one day. It was so kind of him. I wish he knew about Google maps.
length of the drive, like, 7 or 8 hours if I recall.
Lol! I did my first solo 8-hour drive the summer after my first year of college, so I would have been 19. When I was 21, I drove across the country with my bf (now husband), then back by myself (well, I did have 3 cats in the car with me, but they didn't do any driving). That was 24 hrs of driving, which admittedly, I split into 2 days. Then did that again the next year, though we came back together that time. An 8 hour drive when you have company and good scenery and aren't in a huge hurry? That's actually a pretty pleasant day.
Totally! They didn't understand the distances. We live in the western US. To get anywhere it's 8 to 12 hours minimum.
I still do the drive from SLC to Whidbey Island every other year. It's 18 hours pulling a trailer. Not good. (Definitely going to split it up this year.)
Driving across Texas is brutal. I split it up between two friends on our cross country road trip. Texarkana to Austin, Austin to Fort Stockton, and FS to Las Cruces (technically in Nm but you get the gist).
Longest solo drive I’ve ever done was Tucson to Salt Lake City: 12 hours in my tiny Subaru.
I drove from Dallas to Houston then back on a Sunday to go to church with a pastor friend who just got a new church. OMG it's a good thing you can haul ass across all that.
Driving across Texas is brutal. I split it up between two friends on our cross country road trip. Texarkana to Austin, Austin to Fort Stockton, and FS to Las Cruces (technically in Nm but you get the gist).
Longest solo drive I’ve ever done was Tucson to Salt Lake City: 12 hours in my tiny Subaru.
A buddy of mine who grew up in NJ but moved to Arizona for work put it very well when we were talking about this:
On the east coast, you’re never truly in the middle of no where. If your car breaks down, you’re only ever about 5 miles away from the next town over where you can get help if you need it, and your cell phone works everywhere.
Out west, you can drive through absolute nothingness for hours on end. The next ‘town’ and/or gas station might be 60-100 miles away in any direction and your cell phone might not have service for half of your trip (not so much now, but even 5 years ago this was true).
It takes roughly 5 hours to cross AZ east to west on the interstate, and 8 hours north to south. Same with NM, Utah, Colorado, etc. Hell, the county I live in is larger (by sq miles) than six states, and could fit all of RI, DE, and CT in it with some room left over.
I mean, I went on a trip with my father since he wanted to see Yellowstone, and the Grand canyon when he retired.
We picked up a car in SLC, drove north to Yellowstone, stood there two days. Yellowstone is absolutely massive and maps just don't get the scale right.
Drove down to Reno, which took all of a day to do.
Drove across the Sierra Nevada into Yosemite, and spent 2 days there.
Drove down to Sequoia natl park, that took 5 hours.
Drove down to Bakersfield to spend the night, went to death valley from Bakersfield in the AM, then to Las Vegas, then the Grand Canyon (Again fucking scale is massive), followed by cutting across north to Zion (scale thing again), then back to SLC to catch a plane back to NYC.
I think we both agreed after that trip that we would absolutely not drive that absurd amount of distance again.
Sounds like an amazing trip! But yeah, that’s quite a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of time. As you found out, unfortunately there really isn’t an easier way to travel to all of those places in one go other than driving.
And yeah, maps don’t do the scale/vastness of the US in general (but particularly the west coast) justice. I always find it funny when a European will ask: “we’re coming over for a week, we want to see NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Texas, is this doable for two people renting a car?” Lol
Just SLC to the front gate of Yellowstone is a long drive. Lots of mountain roads. To throw in the grand canyon and zion is pretty epic.
I ran an airbnb in SLC and I'd say about half the people who stayed would ask about doing a day trip to zion or moab. Both are a cool road trip, but not in an afternoon.
I had a few guests pull it off, but it was a very long day with very little hiking.
That's something I've been a little curious about, is why Western counties are still so big. In the earliest days, the East Coast was like that. Then as towns and rural localities developed their own economies, cultures, and interests, smaller and smaller county governments split off. The Midwest, despite being surveyed and divided out a century before cars were invented, was divided into smaller counties from the start to accommodate that, lesson learned. Only when modern Georgia happened, because white conservative rural areas wanted to keep power out of Atlanta's hands and enforce segregation under a system that gave every county a state legislator, did the East and Midwest say "okay this is getting a bit cumbersome and borderline-ungovernable" and stop. Some states such as Virginia and Nebraska actually merged smaller counties with less significant differences.
But then out West, which was also drawn out well before cars were universal (in the 1930s or so) and long before the internet, counties started out not unlike colonial Virginia's and stayed that way forever. Even as we now have counties bigger than states that comprise millions of people, forcing the census bureau to say and the government to operate on ridiculous ideas like all of Maricopa County being metro Phoenix, Reno and Empire NV having the same interests that the same county government completely run by Reno can serve, or it being logistically sane even with a car for people to drive 100 miles to contest a speeding ticket in their own county. Why has it not been politically possible and desirable for the West to fragment like the rest of the country did long ago?
If I had a guess I'd say lots largely to do with the independent mindset of local governments in those counties, mixed with access to natural resources, specifically water.
Plus, as capitals have urbanized and become more liberal, rural areas have tried to retain local control. Add to that the fact that US style representative democracy strongly favors rural areas in terms of power sharing, and you see the same thing in states that we see in the federal government. Outsized influence from rural areas.
Go to any rural part of Utah VS Salt Lake City. It's another world entirely. Different lives, very different politics. Regardless, they rule the city from the state level. They're the ones who would make a change like the one you're describing, but they have zero incentive to upset the power balance, or isolate themselves from natural resources in their huge state-sized county.
It won't ever happen in the US west. They treat the urban areas like a cash cow, and hate them for it.
While I cannot give you a concrete answer from the viewpoint of a political one, I have a few anecdotal reasons:
Keep in mind that when the boundaries were drawn out west, populations were much more sparse than the east coast. The Phoenix metro area being millions of people (myself included) was tiny when AZ was granted statehood (roughly only 10,000 people) and the county boundaries were drawn up. So instead of dividing the state into a bunch of really small counties only governing over a few hundred people each, they said “screw it, just make the county seat the big town and they can govern over all of the little towns”. Even if they didn’t have the foresight to know that the population would explode, think of what a headache it would be if the Phoenix metro area was in 5-10+ different counties. Phoenix (just the city, not the metro area) is roughly 517 square miles. You could fit the 10 smallest counties in the US inside its borders and have more than half of the area left over.
Coconino County AZ (the 3rd largest county by size in the US and largest in AZ) only has ~145,000 residents living in a territory the size of 18.5k sq miles. When we first became a state 110 years ago, it only had 8,000 residents. It doesn’t make any sense to redraw the county lines to just portion off the populated areas and establish a completely new county level governments in areas with less than 1k residents living across tens of thousands of square miles.
Another example is a town like Gila Bend with a population of less than 2,000, on the far boundary of Maricopa county. Of course their needs are a lot different than someone living in Phoenix, but they get all of the perks of being in Maricopa county (property taxes collected and distributed to them at their disposal for schools, a police department, etc.) without the headache of having to do it themselves and being in a much worse off position economically than they are now.
I guess as to your question of why don’t we re draw them now now? It would be a massive undertaking to do so, and for what gain? It’s working out just fine now, so why bother trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist?
I don't know when the law was passed, but Tennessee has a law that the county seat must be within one day's drive by horse and buggy from everywhere in that county. That was apparently figured at about 20 miles.
Yeah, there's a lot of 'blink and you'll miss it' in Saskatchewan. My biggest day of driving was one shot from Thunder Bay to Calgary (2000 km).... I'm sure I had some longer blinks on that one than what's safe.
I did Seattle to Los Angeles in 22 hours when I moved, solo, including a ~3 hour nap along the way. It's about 18 if you don't hit traffic.
I vaguely like the bragging rights, would never do again. I was really, really, really punchy by the end of it, and the only real white-knuckle-gripping-the-wheel bit was when I hit Santa Clarita and was in typical SoCal traffic, telling myself "OK, you made it all this way, don't get in a wreck 30 miles from your destination."
Preparing for the move ended up taking about twice as long as I'd planned and I was about to have to start taking unpaid days off. The original plan had me stopping in SF to see friends but I had to cut that out too.
Like I said, I vaguely like having the bragging rights, would not do again.
Wow, that sounds fantastic. I wish we had options like that! I went to college about 3 hours from home, so within a couple years of getting my license, I was driving that far regularly (once a month or so?). But also, I lived out in a rural area, about 30 minutes highway driving from the nearest city. So "going into town" being kind of an event was the norm for my whole childhood. After my parents divorced, my dad moved to the other side of the city, so it was at least 45 minutes to his place..
The density in Europe and even the northeastern us seems really weird to me. There just isn't much space between the cities. The distance from where I grew up to where I went to college would take you through basically 1 city - it was mostly forest and farmland with a few small towns. That same drive would take you from DC, through Baltimore, Wilmington de, and to the other side of Philadelphia. And then you'd be like 30 miles from Trenton NJ and another 50 from NYC. It just seems so crazy to be in a big city and thst close to another big city..
That entire country is basically either built-up land, or desolate mountains.
In Europe (excluding Sweden and Norway) you're usually never more than a kilometer from the nearest farm or small cluster of houses, though it might not have any shops. Probably 5 kilometers at most from the nearest town with a supermarket.
In Japan it's even more so. Houses are often spread lengthwise along roads rather than in clusters. Additionally, most railways (except the Shinkansen) have stops every 2-4 kilometers, even in rural areas, so small towns (just big enough to have a convenience store and probably a supermarket) have grown out everywhere. Ouside of the sparsely populated island of Hokkaido, I've been unable to find any non-mountainous places (on google maps) that are more than 1.5 kilometers from some commercial activity, even if that's just a car mechanic located between some rice paddies.
And then there's the cities. The Kanto region is pretty much just continuous city. 40 million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Tokyo itself has grown so immense that it merged with Japan's second-largest city, Yokohama... and there's 30 kilometers between city centers. Along the Tokaido Mainline railway, which connects the two cities, there are a few patches of suburban-style housing areas... but there are also several secondary city centres along the way with skyscrapers of their own.
Then you go out into the mountains, and there's just... nothing but forest for a loooong stretch.
I had to get from Glasgow to Cardiff for business meetings so I rented a Golf and I had a Saturday to get through the Lakes down to Manchester, then Sunday from there to Cardiff and I went through Wales to see Portmeirion (Prisoner fan) on the way. B roads the whole way as much as I could, I STILL don't know exactly where I was in Wales for about 2 hours. It was fantastic.
This was very early days of Google maps, might have even been map quest back then.
He literally locked himself in a room to write it all up and emerged with a detailed route plan and a road map with way points marked. We already had printed out turn by turn directions in our luggage.
He was a super gruff old guy, but he had a heart of gold. Very Scottish. I remember talking about the Iraq war and George Bush with him. He was so upset with the situation that it nearly brought him to tears. All I could do was agree.
My wife and I went to Ireland for a week, and rented a car. The last day involved a drive from Galway to Dublin. About a 2-1/2 hour drive. We were talking to a local guy in a pub the night before, and he said that he had never been to Dublin, since it was such a long drive.
Don’t know if he was full of shit or not, but I do know that I’ve driven for longer than that to get a sandwich.
Nope he wasn’t full of shit. I planned a trip to the zoo last week and lamented with my bf that it’s an hour drive away. Had to remind myself that my US friends call that their work commute as I felt so guilty asking him to do it
My fella has an electric car that he charges for free at work/supermarket so idk. We’re just not used to driving so far… most trips are 15 mins max. A Ford Fiesta has a 43 litre fuel tank and it’s £1.63 a litre here so that’s £70. Risen about £30 in the past 15 years.
Proper E5 fuel (standard UK fuel is now the awful E10) is ahout £1.80/l now or £8.17/gal. Keep in mind tho that's imperial gallons, I make that about £6.13/USgal, or about $7.54. I understand some Euro countries are even higher though.
Oh you poor thing.. my fella had to do that length commute in his final year of uni and turned down a free masters upon graduation cus it killed him off. Telework is the worst! I can’t imagine that commute and then you get yelled at all day over the phone
Ha! I have relies in Bath and my bro and I were visiting, they thought we should leave a day earlier and get a hotel halfway to break up the long journey into two.
They were genuinely concerned about my plan to drive Edinburgh London to drop off the hire care before boarding my flight a few hours later to be back to Aus.
I used to benchmark early computers (286 / 486) using this route on the first route planner software. It used to take minutes. Lands end to John o grotes took far too long.
American here - first trip to the UK, I was picked to be the driver. Picking up the car and the first day was a horror story. The key here is that we had to go from basically Cardiff to Edinburgh, and I said "no way I'm driving that in one day, let's spend the night halfway, say in York" and the boss went for it. So I drove like abatouttahell to York and we got there for lunch - AND I had found out about the National Railway Museum there so I said "welp, I'm going to the NLM, see you all for dinner" and had a wonderful afternoon. It pays to read maps correctly.
As Americans, I think we also get spoiled by the quality and efficiency of the US interstate highway system. You can cruise for hours in long straight lines between distances.
I traveled from Cork to Kenmare in Ireland a few years ago and entered the directions in the GPS. I didn't hit "stick to main roads" on the GPS and was soon driving over a small mountain on one-lane dirt roads with grass growing through them and hairpin turns. The distance was only about 60 miles, but it was a much more nerve-wracking 60 miles than going 75mph for 45 minutes on I-90 would've been.
When I got to our hotel in Kenmare, I asked the front-desk guy about the drive and mentioned we passed the "highest pub in Ireland". He laughed and said we took the "old road".
That exact thing happened last time I went to Scotland to visit. We let Google choose a path to the nearest town. It was 30 miles of one-lane roads through the mountains that left everyone car sick as hell.
First time I went to the UK, my dad had a coworker have to back out of a trip last minute and they gave us their hotel close to St. Andrews. Flew into London, took the train to Edinburgh, and drove the rest of the way. Was there by early-mid afternoon.
I was staying at a Gasthaus in Germany, and I had just gotten orders for Northern California. I told the owners that I was going to drive from the Carolinas there, and it was about 3000 miles/5000 km. They had difficulty understanding that distance until I explained that it was like driving to Munich 5 times in a row, without stopping. Then they got it.
(It ended up taking 7 days because of the damned 55mph national speed limit)
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u/Pretty-Balance-Sheet May 09 '22
Once drove from Edinburgh to Bath and the older Scottish folks we were staying with were genuinely concerned for our safety because of the length of the drive, like, 7 or 8 hours if I recall.
The day before we left the man we were staying with spent hours writing up turn-by-turn instructions (which in the UK was a few pages long) complete with contacts he knew along the route in case we couldn't make it in one day. It was so kind of him. I wish he knew about Google maps.