That's gonna be a while. Current speed record from what I see for passenger trains is around 350 miles per hour. The quick math I did for getting from NYC to Miami in 45 minutes needed like 1,700mph. From what I'm seeing even the experimental stuff right now doesn't get above 400mph.
There were a lot of things we couldn’t do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact. People often asked us if, because of this fact, it was fun to fly the jet. Fun would not be the first word I would use to describe flying this plane. Intense, maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when we would have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment.
It occurred when Walt and I were flying our final training sortie. We needed 100 hours in the jet to complete our training and attain Mission Ready status. Somewhere over Colorado we had passed the century mark. We had made the turn in Arizona and the jet was performing flawlessly. My gauges were wired in the front seat and we were starting to feel pretty good about ourselves, not only because we would soon be flying real missions but because we had gained a great deal of confidence in the plane in the past ten months. Ripping across the barren deserts 80,000 feet below us, I could already see the coast of California from the Arizona border. I was, finally, after many humbling months of simulators and study, ahead of the jet.
I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for Walter in the back seat. There he was, with no really good view of the incredible sights before us, tasked with monitoring four different radios. This was good practice for him for when we began flying real missions, when a priority transmission from headquarters could be vital. It had been difficult, too, for me to relinquish control of the radios, as during my entire flying career I had controlled my own transmissions. But it was part of the division of duties in this plane and I had adjusted to it. I still insisted on talking on the radio while we were on the ground, however. Walt was so good at many things, but he couldn’t match my expertise at sounding smooth on the radios, a skill that had been honed sharply with years in fighter squadrons where the slightest radio miscue was grounds for beheading. He understood that and allowed me that luxury.
Just to get a sense of what Walt had to contend with, I pulled the radio toggle switches and monitored the frequencies along with him. The predominant radio chatter was from Los Angeles Center, far below us, controlling daily traffic in their sector. While they had us on their scope (albeit briefly), we were in uncontrolled airspace and normally would not talk to them unless we needed to descend into their airspace.
We listened as the shaky voice of a lone Cessna pilot asked Center for a readout of his ground speed. Center replied: “November Charlie 175, I’m showing you at ninety knots on the ground.”
Now the thing to understand about Center controllers, was that whether they were talking to a rookie pilot in a Cessna, or to Air Force One, they always spoke in the exact same, calm, deep, professional, tone that made one feel important. I referred to it as the ” Houston Center voice.” I have always felt that after years of seeing documentaries on this country’s space program and listening to the calm and distinct voice of the Houston controllers, that all other controllers since then wanted to sound like that, and that they basically did. And it didn’t matter what sector of the country we would be flying in, it always seemed like the same guy was talking. Over the years that tone of voice had become somewhat of a comforting sound to pilots everywhere. Conversely, over the years, pilots always wanted to ensure that, when transmitting, they sounded like Chuck Yeager, or at least like John Wayne. Better to die than sound bad on the radios.
Just moments after the Cessna’s inquiry, a Twin Beech piped up on frequency, in a rather superior tone, asking for his ground speed. “I have you at one hundred and twenty-five knots of ground speed.” Boy, I thought, the Beechcraft really must think he is dazzling his Cessna brethren. Then out of the blue, a navy F-18 pilot out of NAS Lemoore came up on frequency. You knew right away it was a Navy jock because he sounded very cool on the radios. “Center, Dusty 52 ground speed check”. Before Center could reply, I’m thinking to myself, hey, Dusty 52 has a ground speed indicator in that million-dollar cockpit, so why is he asking Center for a readout? Then I got it, ol’ Dusty here is making sure that every bug smasher from Mount Whitney to the Mojave knows what true speed is. He’s the fastest dude in the valley today, and he just wants everyone to know how much fun he is having in his new Hornet. And the reply, always with that same, calm, voice, with more distinct alliteration than emotion: “Dusty 52, Center, we have you at 620 on the ground.”
And I thought to myself, is this a ripe situation, or what? As my hand instinctively reached for the mic button, I had to remind myself that Walt was in control of the radios. Still, I thought, it must be done – in mere seconds we’ll be out of the sector and the opportunity will be lost. That Hornet must die, and die now. I thought about all of our Sim training and how important it was that we developed well as a crew and knew that to jump in on the radios now would destroy the integrity of all that we had worked toward becoming. I was torn.
Somewhere, 13 miles above Arizona, there was a pilot screaming inside his space helmet. Then, I heard it. The click of the mic button from the back seat. That was the very moment that I knew Walter and I had become a crew. Very professionally, and with no emotion, Walter spoke: “Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?” There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. “Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground.”
I think it was the forty-two knots that I liked the best, so accurate and proud was Center to deliver that information without hesitation, and you just knew he was smiling. But the precise point at which I knew that Walt and I were going to be really good friends for a long time was when he keyed the mic once again to say, in his most fighter-pilot-like voice: “Ah, Center, much thanks, we’re showing closer to nineteen hundred on the money.”
For a moment Walter was a god. And we finally heard a little crack in the armor of the Houston Center voice, when L.A.came back with, “Roger that Aspen, Your equipment is probably more accurate than ours. You boys have a good one.”
It all had lasted for just moments, but in that short, memorable sprint across the southwest, the Navy had been flamed, all mortal airplanes on freq were forced to bow before the King of Speed, and more importantly, Walter and I had crossed the threshold of being a crew. A fine day’s work. We never heard another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast.
For just one day, it truly was fun being the fastest guys out there.
Concorde is a tailless aircraft design with a narrow fuselage permitting four-abreast seating for 92 to 128 passengers, an ogival delta wing, and a droop nose for landing visibility. It is powered by four Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 turbojets with variable engine intake ramps, and reheat for take-off and acceleration to supersonic speed. Constructed from aluminium, it was the first airliner to have analogue fly-by-wire flight controls. The airliner had transatlantic range while supercruising at twice the speed of sound for 75% of the distance.[5]
The fastest transatlantic airliner flight was from New York JFK to London Heathrow on 7 February 1996, aided by a 175 mph (282 km/h) tailwind, by the British Airways G-BOAD, in 2 hours, 52 minutes, 59 seconds from take-off to touchdown.[227] On 13 February 1985, a Concorde charter flight flew from London Heathrow to Sydney in a time of 17 hours, 3 minutes and 45 seconds, including refuelling stops.[228][229]
Supercruise is sustained supersonic flight of a supersonic aircraft without using afterburner. Many supersonic military aircraft are not capable of supercruise and can maintain Mach 1+ flight only in short bursts with afterburners. Aircraft such as the SR-71 Blackbird are designed to cruise at supersonic speed with afterburners enabled.
Some fighter jets are capable of supercruise but only at high altitudes and in a clean configuration, so the term may imply "a significant increase in effective combat speed with a full weapons load over existing types".[1] One of the pre-eminent military examples of supercruise is the F-22 Raptor, for which supercruise was defined as "the ability to cruise at speeds of one and a half times the speed of sound or greater without the use of afterburner for extended periods in combat configuration."[2]
One of the best-known examples of an aircraft capable of supercruise, and the only notable non-military example, was the Concorde. Due to its long service as a commercial airliner, the Concorde holds the record for the most time spent supersonic; more than all other western aircraft combined.[3]
I looked at taking a train from Albuquerque to Denver for a concert, the trip takes 2-3 days and goes from Albuquerque toto Chicago to Denver and one way cost more than a round trip flight. For reference, it is a 7ish hour drive.
Their long hauls are definitely more vacation based, where the ride is part of the journey - and if you're not into that then I get how you feel. Amtrak has been doing a great job at refocusing on corridors. The east coast obviously, then they're working hard on a few key ones like:
Minneapolis to Chicago
Portland-Seattle-Vancouver
California corridor
Eventually, here's hoping, the Frontrange: Pueblo-Colorado Springs-Denver-Fort Collins-Cheyenne.
Those are all shorter trips that don't make much sense to fly with how short it is, and with a few daily trips makes traveling between those cities much easier. Personally those are much better usages of Amtrak's time. I've taken the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver one multiple times and it's so much nicer than driving - but it's max 4 hours.
I wish they'd upgrade their long haul routes to go faster. There's one from SLC to SF I'm interested in, but it takes 18 hours, vs 11 by car or 2 by plane. If it was faster than driving, I'd consider it to avoid the airport.
I don't blame them for focusing on the easier trips though.
Same, but with the limited funding I get why. Shorter trips like that make money, long hauls don't - and since they don't own the tracks they can't even upgrade them or begin to do anything. I will say 18 is a lot (especially in a coach seat), but there is a positive of not having to drive. I usually take my steam deck and just zone out. Overnights though are tough in coach, for that you really have to want to be there.
Yeah, if I want to go anywhere interesting, it would be an overnight trip, with kids. A sleeping room is way too expensive, so it's a nonstarter. If it was 3x the speed, it would probably be fine, especially if they left in the morning instead of the evening.
So yeah, the only train I take is the commuter, and only to go to the airport because there's no connection from the train to my work (there's a way to get there, but the trip would take 2 hours each way). The commuter can't go very fast because it has to stop every 5-10 miles, but it's fine since it goes about as fast as a car.
So yeah, here's hoping Amtrak can make enough on the east coast to be able to upgrade the west coast.
Their long hauls are definitely more vacation based, where the ride is part of the journey
I get that, but I was looking for an alternative to driving 14 hours round trip. Even if the trip took 7 hours each way, I am not driving it. But to go from 7 hours to 45 hours is insane. For a show on the 5th of November in Denver I have to leave Albuquerque on the 3rd, then leave Denver on the 6th to get back home on the 8th. $171 for the cheap seats each way.
I live near SLC and go get to San Francisco is about 18 hours, and that's a straight shot. Coach costs about $120, each way, which is about the same price as a non-budget airline. There's only one train each day and it runs from midnight to about 6PM the next day.
By car it's about 11 hours and about 2 hours by airplane.
So it's:
slower
not cheaper, perhaps more expensive if you don't mind budget flights
less flexible - one train/day in most cases
There are tons of places I just can't get to, like Las Vegas.
If I was retired or something when spending more time was totally fine, I'd consider taking the train. But as it stands, it's just not a practical option unless the train is the destination.
I remember driving out of Miami and even after an hour on the highway there were still exit signs for 10000th street or some shit like that. The American sprawl is difficult for Europeans to comprehend.
77 million people voted for trump in 2024. Even if you subtract the 50% that can't write, that leaves more than 38 million people who could seriously say this on Lemmy. Don't pretend that the orange clown ruined the country all by himself.
America is pretty unique in size. If you're used to shorter trips even overestimating wouldn't be half the drive through america. Especially Europeans as a long drive is anything over 20m when its measured in hours they're considering booking accommodations for sleep and such. The perception of time is incredibly different.
It's the second biggest "Western" country. It's about twice as big as the EU, about as big as the whole of Europe with about the same population, so it's mostly empty in the middle.
The obverse would be an American who wants to go to Europe, start out in Madrid, lunch in Copenhagen and fly back from Istambul.
But the US isn't unique in size. It's right next to two big countries, with Canada being even bigger, Europeand are familiar with Russia that's the biggest country in the world, it's not like people don't know about China, Brazil and how they're yuge...
Technically the US is unique in size. Name another nation that is 9.8 million km2. Canada is 10 million km2,Russia is 17.1 million km2, China is is 9.6 million...
So to say it is 'unique in size' is technically correct, the best kind of correct!
European here, although our countries are smaller. 20 mins is quite obviously a short drive.
UK is pretty small but it still takes 7 Hours to get from Glasgow to london and I can't imagine anyone booking overnight accommodation for that drive. That's two major cities with 100% motorway/freeway driving, I haven't even brought up Cornwall.
I drive 5h for family within England on a monthly basis.
My family that still lives there stay overnight for trips like that. Me on the other hand: drove across Canada and would drive 4 hours, nap for 20 minutes, repeat...because hotels were expensive and my plan of campsite tenting overnight was just too much setup and take down after the first day.
Had a friend from SE Asia that wanted to visit me in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She found a flight to Canada alright. To VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA. She asked if I could come pick her up if I wasn't too busy.
If you go through the US, Google Maps tells me about 56 hours, or 18-19 hours/day if you're doing it in 3. If you go through Canada only, add about 3 hours. I think Google Maps estimates are a bit generous on time esp. if you're comfortable exceeding the speed limit a bit, so maybe you could do it in 50 hours.
It's doable in 3, but it wouldn't be fun at all. I've done 14+ hours driving in a day (so 4 days?), and it sucks, so yeah, 5 might be a bit too much as well.
The most I've done continuously is 12. No stops but for gas, visiting my GF at college decades ago.
I've done 18 with the kids in the car. We made it to Disney at sun up and I lost the first day being to tired to go to the damn park. The kids slept overnight, but my wife and I were cooked.
I've done 14 fairly often but doing that every day would suck. I'm usually fine the next day (I do all the driving because I'd otherwise get carsick), but I don't think I'd be fine for 3 days.
According to Google Maps, it's about 56 hours. Can't quite squeeze it into two days, but you could get close. If you're able to sustain 50% over the speed limit, you could maybe do it in 48 hours, with fuel refills.
When I was in college at Eastern New Mexico, which is about 45 minutes west of Amarillo Texas, a couple friends, both from New England, had the bright idea of driving down to the gulf over a 4 day weekend.
I cautioned them against the idea, trying to explain Texas was bigger than they could imagine. Three hours into the trip we got a motel room in some hole in the wall town and went back to school the next morning.
What? It takes 24 hours to drive from the Canadian border to Mexico border. Texas is about 770 miles at its widest, that’s a breezy 10-12 hour drive doing the speed limit or just over.
The only place I've driven for multiple hours that was worse than Texas was Nevada. Even rural Indiana is a huge upgrade and that place stinks from soy bean processing (I think?)
Michigan and California are incredible.
Looking at Saskatchewan....I dunno man, looks really pretty to me!
Compared to the other provinces, it’s just flat farm fields. When the rapeseed (canola) is blooming it can look pretty, but it’s just yellow flowers for HOURS, no variety.
Edit, oh and for six months it’s white with snow, and the highway is dead straight, it’s hard to stay awake for the six hours.
Wait, you're driving south through Nevada? Do yourself a favor and go east to I-15 or west to I-5, both are orders of magnitude better than going north/south through Nevada...
The only time I drive through Nevada is either from SLC to Lake Tahoe (northern Nevada) or SLC to Vegas/LA (southern tip of Nevada) because the alternative takes way longer.
I guess, but arguably you would only hit one in the day, and the chances of it being during rush hour is slim, can always plan better around that stuff too. Or take secondary highways. There’s not only a single highway going places.
Nope, in America through-traffic goes right through the city center. Fortunately, many cities have innovated to solve this problem by bulldozing their city centers to build more stroads
That's not true in many parts of the country. It's very much a mixed bag. Look at San Antonio, 410 goes around the city and connects the various highways so you don't need to go through the city center to drive past the city. In Seattle, 405 was intended to do that for Seattle to avoid 15, but then Bellevue got huge. In SLC, we have 215.
Beltroutes are common across the country and are designed to solve exactly this problem.
Stroads are a different problem unconnected to highways going through cities. In fact, they're often the old highways that went through town and became a stroad when the highway was built. We then built more of them because people liked driving cars to their destination instead of walking or taking transit.
The best possible bypass won't solve the stroad problem or congestion in the city center. What we need is a complete redesign of what a city center means, which I think should be:
exits for a city only at the edges, and no reasonable way to cut through the city
tons of free parking at the edge of cities and cheap or free transit from the edge to the city center
fantastic mass transit inside of cities
car free zone in downtown, so the only way to get there is transit or walking/cycling
If we can do that, we can rip out stroads to make room for more density in attractions. Keep some roads for trucks to make deliveries and whatnot, and convert the rest to walkable streets.
Having exits isn't the same as "driving through downtown."
I do agree that we should redo how highways work, and part of that is having fewer exits, but what causes slowdowns isn't the quantity of exits, but the ability to get almost everywhere in a car. In other words, the number of exits are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The highway infrastructure is in the right place much of the time, the issue is the rest of the infrastructure.
We don't need more bypasses or lanes, we need driving to be less convenient than transit and walking for short trips. I think one simple change would improve things greatly: cut major arteries in the middle to prevent getting from one edge of the city to the other quickly by car. Basically, restrict those areas to delivery trucks, buses, and emergency services, and force the rest of the traffic to filter through side streets. Just that amount of inconvenience would push a bunch of people to use transit instead, and the areas cut off could be converted to a street.
I went on a cross Canada car drive in the early 2000s. We left from Sudbury Ontario to make it to the west coast in BC. We took our time, sight seeing and making many stops along the way. Ten days later we made it to Vancouver.
The best part was that on our sixth day, we ran into a friend in Medicine Hat, Alberta. He had left Kapuskasing, Ontario the day before and was expecting to make it to Vancouver in about 60 hours with non stop driving. His eyes were so blood shot and he was literally shaking from all the caffeine drinks, pills and coffee he had been taking. He had some strangers with him that he had picked up as hitch hikers and he said they were keeping him awake.
We worried about him the whole time but he called us two days later to say he made it. We caught up with him three days later.
We were headed Portales to Corpus Christi, which according to Apple Maps is about 9 1/2 hours. We did not have Apple Maps then, we had Rand McNally. So at best it would have taken us 11 hours. And yes everything looked the same.
Conversely, I, as an American who had the opportunity to spend a few months in Germany, was surprised at how close all the countries were.
Great culture in all the places I went (Brussels and Prague were my two standout favorites!) Traveling was hella cheap. The food was fire everywhere I went. The architecture was INCREDIBLE. And the knowledge that you could go to the hospital for less than $100 was nuts. Don't even get me started on how legitimately cool it is to sit in a 1000 year old pub.
I didn't want to come back. I nearly cried when I got the return flight info.
It still shocks me to tell people "Yeah, I lived in Germany for a bit and some weekends we would fuck off to France."
The borders of European countries are great because there's all this security infrastructure that they've built but then they don't use any of it. There's always just a bunch of ballads and you have to drive around little security checkpoints but there's never anyone around.
My personal favourite is Geneva which is kind of just an extended bit of Switzerland because the city was already there, but really by any logical sense it should be in France. So they deal with that by basically just ignoring it, and people just pop to and fro all the time.
I submitted a job application once to Freiburg. One of the main reasons was that if I'm unhappy with the food selection, both France and Switzerland is something like 20kms away
Miles originated in Britain, so talk to them about their made-up nonsense.
At least they were eventually willing to give up the imperial system. I still don't understand why Americans never got on board with metric; it's so much easier.
Time zones start in UK because of some decent reasoning. France was also a contender for where timezones start for the same kinds of reasoning but conceded it in agreement that UK adopts the new metric system they created
…wait a minute… am I being made a fool of? Can't tell, cuz I don't comprehend dumb units. I'd legit buy that as a real thing, given how stupid those tend to be
A US customary mile is 5280 US customary feet. 1 US customary foot is 12 US customary inches. 1 US customary inch is 25.4mm. So a US customary mile is 1609344mm, exactly. It derives from the roman "mille passus", literally 1000 paces, where a pace is the distance between two impacts of the left (or right) foot of a Roman soldier on the march. Quite a few other cultures used a "mile" of some sort even after the fall of Rome, for example the old British imperial mile was 1760 British imperial yards, one British imperial yard predated the definition of the meter but was most precisely measured to be 0.914398415m, so the British imperial mile was 1609341.21mm. Other culture's miles varied even more than this.
I'm a fan of high speed rail too, but I also wonder if it's ever going to be comparable to flying for long distances like this.
Like, even traveling in a direct line on a plane (which averages 600mph, or 2-3x the average speed of high speed rail), it still takes 6 hours from NYC to LA.
Anything under about 500 km is better by train. While the train is slower, once you count getting to and from the airport and in and out of the plane, you're still faster overall. Above that the plane will usually be faster. If you take the environmental cost into account, the train always wins.
In the US, I regularly caught domestic flights arriving <1hr before departure, I don't think a 18 hour high speed train can compete with a 6 hour flight.
Then again, I just looked at the high speed trains from Beijing to Kunming for the next few days, and while none of the trains are booked solid, a lot of business and first class seats are sold out or <10 left.
Meanwhile a flight goes for less than half the price and takes <4 hours.
So IDK why that route even exists, let alone why anyone would choose it over a plane, but apparently they do.
Do people take the train for the entire trip, or do most get on/off as it goes? I have used trains that cross the entire country (UK) before but never used them from start to end.
Honestly, if trains were 1/3 as fast as planes, I'd take them.
My family lives about 800 miles away (by car, less as the crow flies), which takes about 14 hours by car, 2.5 hours by plane, and 45 hours by train (36 moving time). To be fair, it covers more ground (almost 2x at ~1400 miles), but driving that same roite would only be ~22 hours. To make up for the extra distance, the train would need to go about twice the speed, so 120-150mph, to match driving, which is completely feasible. If I could do that trip via train in one day, I'd do it vs taking the plane.
I don't think expecting trains to go 2-3x the speed of cars is unreasonable. I'd still probably take an airplane for longer trips, but anything within 1k miles or so should be reasonable to do by rail.
Although it is true the definitions for high speed trains mention 200km/h, it is good to know many lines exist with 300km/h or above as speed limit (and the speed limit is regularly driven on these lines).
High speed rail is enough for medium size trips that I would normally drive. When driving isn't feasible (more than 800 miles or so), I'd need faster than typical high speed rail.
With the distances provided, flying would be faster than high speed rail. Even if there was a maglev train from NYC to Miami, I think the flight would still be faster unless there were major delays flying out.
Fun fact: This scene is from the aftermath of the first and only attack by the devil named Gun, who stands in as a metaphor for gun violence (not very subtle, but that's the point)
Lol, in the manga I think it was crazier than this. There was just an immense scar across an entire continent in a straight line, as if a mile wide bulldozer just drove across everything. I don't remember if it targeted a government official or not, but I vaguely
::: spoiler spoiler
remember control planting a piece of the gun devil as a lure.
:::
This is actually pretty similar to what some coworkers visiting from EU wanted to do.
They were here on a two week work trip and I asked them what they were doing for their weekend. It was something like "We rented a car and are going to go to New Orleans, then to Nashville, up to New York City, over to the Grand canyon, and maybe San Francisco if we have time before we head back to the office"
I had to explain that the state we were in was larger than their country and they couldn't cover that much ground in two days even if they only drove and didn't stop once.
We had a good laugh and then just did a hike on Saturday :)
Edit : "in Europe 100km is a long distance and in the US 100 years is a long time". Forget where I heard that but it seems accurate
I once saw a post from an American guy visiting family in Germany. They borrowed him a car so he could visit other family about 400KM away.
The family that owned the car spend an entire day getting it checked out by a mechanic, making sure all the fluids where fine, getting the tire pressure just right, etc.
He thought it was pretty funny because he drove double that distance every week just to go to work.
My brother went to college in upstate NY in the 80’s and made friends with a girl who was born & raised in Manhattan. One weekend, in all seriousness, she suggested taking the subway to the Grand Canyon.
So, back in 2009, I lived in a tour bus touring with big acts like Linkin Park, Pearl Jam and guys like that. Well, we did a little stint with Madonna and we went from LA, straight to NYC, down to Miami and straight back to LA in I think about a week. It was one of the most brutal on road experiences I've ever had to endure for 4 shows. I was on a really sweet fully decked out tour bus too, so it was the best case scenario. It gave me a new appreciation for how motherfucking vast my country is. However, I would NOT recommend the experience.
I did get to meet Spike Lee and Chris Cornell in Miami tho and even had birthday cake with Justin Timberlake while in NYC. It was his birthday and he was doing a music thing inside our bus. He sat right next to me at the front of the bus and we talked about Pink Floyd. Super nice guy. It was a pretty wild week.
It's true. Im 40 now but i never had kids and chased my dreams from age 14. I dont tell any stories irl very much anymore because some people think I'm showing out or making shit up. Examples:
Had coffee with Pierce Broznan... at his house in Malibu. Wild story.
We had family visit from the UK many years ago. They said after they visited Niagara Falls, they wanted to "pop over" to Prince Edward Island to see Anne of Green Gables. That is an 18h drive if you don't even stop to pee. They finally realized how big Canada really is when somebody showed them a map of England superimposed on a map of Canada.
I mean, it is also about how much time you have in the vacation and how much it feels like a "once in a lifetime" thing, where you take more hardships to check all the "highlights". Like, when we spend 2 weeks in Australia we drove crazy distances, because I don't know whether I will ever be there again. Same for US tourists in Europe, even in this thread "oh, we did Lissabon, London, Paris, Prague and Zagreb". No European would ever cram that into 4 weeks. But if you have the opportunity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When backpacking in China we went from Shanghai to the border of Tibet. Crazy distances again, but we wanted to cover snow capped mountains and Shanghai, solely because of "well, while we're at it". I mean, it felt like we already travelled half-way back home, only to come back to Shanghai to take the return trip.
Anyway, TL;DR: I don't think it's underestimating the size, but a FOMO on a "once in a lifetime" vacation.
Remember that mapping programs only give "travel time", not "total trip time." that 19 hour drive from NY to FL is 19 hours in the car, on the highway. Realistically, that's a 2-3 day trip.
FL to NV is, likewise, 37 hours on the highway. So, same as your office job for a week, but instead of working you're just driving in a car.
With a little elbow grease and knowing where cops might be, you could work those numbers down. ;)
I have to have the road trip conversation with friends before we do anything. It's like, do we want to make this leisurely and the drive is fun, because that's going to need an itinerary and planned stops, or is the destination all that matters? Because I can make that 37 hour drive in about 38, give or take. Most of the time, I'd prefer it that way. Roadside destinations and 'gotta stop here' restaurants are always pretty lame, in my experience.
I mean, sure if you're into repressive heat and humidity 10 months out of the year, clouds of potentially deadly but always annoying mosquitoes, ticks that inflict strange lifelong disabilities, sand everywhere imaginable and dreary mold literally growing on everything - it's fucking great!
Meh, same with US folks visiting Europe, which is actually a common movie trope. I'm sure there's also plenty of people on both continents wo will think something through.
Yeah, we frequently get them in Norway. People who want a weekend trip to Oslo and drive to "the fjords" and back one day, or see stuff after 1500 in winter.
According to a map, Aurlandsfjord is about 4.5 hours drive from Oslo. You could probably see two of them in a day, with a fair amount of driving in between. You'd start around 6 AM and be back around 11PM, but it sounds feasible.
That's not that uncommon where I'm from. I've known people to drive up to Yellowstone from my area (Salt Lake City) for a day trip, which is about 5.5 hours each way. It's a long drive, but you could probably get to two different places within Yellowstone and be back by bedtime. Or if you stay over one night just outside the park, you can spend most of the day at the park before coming home.
Growing up, we'd drive from Seattle to Vancouver, CA a couple times a year for a day trip, and that's about 3 hours each way, depending on the border crossing. My parents would routinely drive from Seattle to Portland for tennis tournaments (not pro, just for fun), which is also about 3 hours each way. I sometimes drive from SLC to Cedar City to watch a play, which is about 3 hours each way. My coworkers drive from SLC to Wendover (1.5 hours) or Las Vegas (5.5 hours) to go gambling, though they usually stay 1-2 nights for Las Vegas.
Driving a few hours to see something is pretty common for Americans.
It's pretty common in the far north as well apparently, with some people claiming people are willing to drive for several hours just for a party.
In the central east, people generally aren't willing to spend all day in a car. A couple of hours drive is acceptable, but once you're at ~5 hours we generally expect to spend the night there. And to not leave at 0600 in the morning:)
As a bonus, some of those mountain passes can be a bit finicky, so they're often good to … not plan very optimistically.
I imagine there's similar sentiment in larger cities (NYC, LA, etc) vs more rural areas here in the US. I grew up in a less densely populated area, so driving long distances was just what we did.
Sure, "TIL Europe is only seven countries." Try the same but go Amsterdam -> Riga -> Athens -> Lisbon -> Amsterdam it's 8000 km in a straight line. Europe might be smaller than North America, but it's not that small.
In the US, the equivalent would be: Seattle -> Boston -> Miami -> San Diego -> Seattle. That's 8500 miles (~13,000 km), and doesn't even go to Alaska or Hawaii. I don't think you can drive around Alaska, but if you could, it would be a similar distance.
Europe isn't small, but it is a lot smaller than the US.
Huh, I always forget that a large chunk of Russia is part of Europe. I've never understood the demarcation between Europe and Asia, I think it should be considered one continent.
If we only count the EU (which I think most refer to when they say they're visiting "Europe"), it's a bit less than half the area at 4,225,104 km2. Maybe round up to 5,000,000 km and include Norway, the UK, and Switzerland, and maybe some of the Baltic states (would probably push to 5.5M km).
I think the reason it is considered a separate continent is due a western centric view, and not geographically motivated. If you look at it, it's mostly where the white people originally lived.
Also, the EU includes some overseas territories which aren't in Europe like Saint Martin and the Canary Islands.
Quick edit; from Saint Martin to Réunion is 13.600 km, and both are in the EU :p.
So this map inspired me to come up with a possible American equivalent of the OP. Apparently from London -> Paris -> Madrid -> Rome -> Berlin would be 53 hours, pretty close to the 55-56 hours I see others in this thread quoting for the NY etc. to LA trip.
Alternatively, you could end in Athens instead of Berlin for a 57 hour trip. That one's kind of neat because it's like a mirror image of the OP, downward at an angle to a peninsula, then go horizontal-ish.
To make a loop like yours, one can go Amsterdam -> Paris -> Barcelona -> Rome -> Berlin -> Amsterdam with a travel time of 52 hrs. Add Vienna between Rome and Berlin for an estimated time of 55 hrs.
I'm actually curious. Putting aside alaska, is there any competition for longest highway in a state? I could imagine florida and california both having roads that could rival texas' longest. Maybe if it's a really windy one in montana or wisconsin.
Not to brag, but the longest Road in Europe is 8641km (5369 miles) long. Though to be fair, it's only partially in Europe, the last 4000 (±1000 as there's no clear border between Europe and Asia) kilometers are in Asia. The longest road that is completely in Europe is only 5190 km (3225 miles) long.
Looks like Delaware might just qualify as well, and Connecticut if it actually had a major roadway on the diagonal from the SW to NE might as well, but the routing Google is giving me goes just over 2h
Sure it might look easy on a map but driving 2,000+ miles all at once can be pretty hard on a car & a human. Don't be surprised if you need to stop for an oil change, new tires, alignment, fix cracks in the windshield from 18-wheelers kicking up rocks. Then there's weather & natural disasters, physical limitations, hands & butt go numb driving 12 hours straight, need to take breaks for physical exercise & sanity checks. I've driven across USA 5x. At least three of those things happened each time. Budget AT LEAST 7 days.
How the fuck do you need an oil change, tyres, and wheel alignment over that short distance? I could understand needing one of those if the trip was short notice and you didn't have time to do it before leaving, but all three are ridiculous.
Also, unless your driver's seat is a plank, no, your butt doesn't go numb.
Right? Most of those are all the kinds of regular maintenance things you button up BEFORE a long trip. Windshield cracks are usually either quick fixes or fixes that can be delayed or patched until you finish the trip.
Frequent enough stops to limits butt pain and blood clots isn't such a bad idea though.
A guy I work with is in Germany. He came to the US for a work meeting. He intended to stay in the US for another week and a half, with plans to rent a car and drive ... basically this route. With all sorts of sightseeing and tourist stops along the way.
I mean I did think road trips were feasible before looking them up not to get dragged into the idea too early, but even then I didn't think it would be a day. In my mind it was like a week at least.
The dream could be realized if America actually had high speed rail, but that would require investing our taxes into real infrastructure instead of state-sponsored terrorism.
Which funny enough is part of the reason they don't have trains. Some dickhead fascist billionaire charmed the simple brained with magic transportation, so they wouldn't invest in high speed rail anymore. Go figure
I’m so sad about the state of the world. At this point I’m resigned to enjoy as much of it as I can while making as little impact as possible then noping out and letting morons continue with their bullshit charade as the planet burns around them
Why not just take the High Speed Rail and get there in 45 minutes instead?
US High Speed Rail:
Hey now, don't knock the Big Boy. He could reach 80mph, that's much faster than most of our rail in the US.
Oh, I'm just kidding. I've only gotten to see 4014 up close once but man is it impressive.
back when America knew how to dominate the rail scene
The US still dominates freight rail.
When this baby hits 88Mph, you’re gonna see some serious shit
Eastwood, Clint Eastwood.
Nice to meet you Mr Estwoud.
idk if I want to ride a train that goes at Mach 2.3 personally.
I'll wait until it's proven, then I'll go find a g suit.
That's gonna be a while. Current speed record from what I see for passenger trains is around 350 miles per hour. The quick math I did for getting from NYC to Miami in 45 minutes needed like 1,700mph. From what I'm seeing even the experimental stuff right now doesn't get above 400mph.
SR-71 has entered the chat.
There were a lot of things we couldn’t do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact. People often asked us if, because of this fact, it was fun to fly the jet. Fun would not be the first word I would use to describe flying this plane. Intense, maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when we would have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment. It occurred when Walt and I were flying our final training sortie. We needed 100 hours in the jet to complete our training and attain Mission Ready status. Somewhere over Colorado we had passed the century mark. We had made the turn in Arizona and the jet was performing flawlessly. My gauges were wired in the front seat and we were starting to feel pretty good about ourselves, not only because we would soon be flying real missions but because we had gained a great deal of confidence in the plane in the past ten months. Ripping across the barren deserts 80,000 feet below us, I could already see the coast of California from the Arizona border. I was, finally, after many humbling months of simulators and study, ahead of the jet. I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for Walter in the back seat. There he was, with no really good view of the incredible sights before us, tasked with monitoring four different radios. This was good practice for him for when we began flying real missions, when a priority transmission from headquarters could be vital. It had been difficult, too, for me to relinquish control of the radios, as during my entire flying career I had controlled my own transmissions. But it was part of the division of duties in this plane and I had adjusted to it. I still insisted on talking on the radio while we were on the ground, however. Walt was so good at many things, but he couldn’t match my expertise at sounding smooth on the radios, a skill that had been honed sharply with years in fighter squadrons where the slightest radio miscue was grounds for beheading. He understood that and allowed me that luxury. Just to get a sense of what Walt had to contend with, I pulled the radio toggle switches and monitored the frequencies along with him. The predominant radio chatter was from Los Angeles Center, far below us, controlling daily traffic in their sector. While they had us on their scope (albeit briefly), we were in uncontrolled airspace and normally would not talk to them unless we needed to descend into their airspace. We listened as the shaky voice of a lone Cessna pilot asked Center for a readout of his ground speed. Center replied: “November Charlie 175, I’m showing you at ninety knots on the ground.” Now the thing to understand about Center controllers, was that whether they were talking to a rookie pilot in a Cessna, or to Air Force One, they always spoke in the exact same, calm, deep, professional, tone that made one feel important. I referred to it as the ” Houston Center voice.” I have always felt that after years of seeing documentaries on this country’s space program and listening to the calm and distinct voice of the Houston controllers, that all other controllers since then wanted to sound like that, and that they basically did. And it didn’t matter what sector of the country we would be flying in, it always seemed like the same guy was talking. Over the years that tone of voice had become somewhat of a comforting sound to pilots everywhere. Conversely, over the years, pilots always wanted to ensure that, when transmitting, they sounded like Chuck Yeager, or at least like John Wayne. Better to die than sound bad on the radios. Just moments after the Cessna’s inquiry, a Twin Beech piped up on frequency, in a rather superior tone, asking for his ground speed. “I have you at one hundred and twenty-five knots of ground speed.” Boy, I thought, the Beechcraft really must think he is dazzling his Cessna brethren. Then out of the blue, a navy F-18 pilot out of NAS Lemoore came up on frequency. You knew right away it was a Navy jock because he sounded very cool on the radios. “Center, Dusty 52 ground speed check”. Before Center could reply, I’m thinking to myself, hey, Dusty 52 has a ground speed indicator in that million-dollar cockpit, so why is he asking Center for a readout? Then I got it, ol’ Dusty here is making sure that every bug smasher from Mount Whitney to the Mojave knows what true speed is. He’s the fastest dude in the valley today, and he just wants everyone to know how much fun he is having in his new Hornet. And the reply, always with that same, calm, voice, with more distinct alliteration than emotion: “Dusty 52, Center, we have you at 620 on the ground.” And I thought to myself, is this a ripe situation, or what? As my hand instinctively reached for the mic button, I had to remind myself that Walt was in control of the radios. Still, I thought, it must be done – in mere seconds we’ll be out of the sector and the opportunity will be lost. That Hornet must die, and die now. I thought about all of our Sim training and how important it was that we developed well as a crew and knew that to jump in on the radios now would destroy the integrity of all that we had worked toward becoming. I was torn. Somewhere, 13 miles above Arizona, there was a pilot screaming inside his space helmet. Then, I heard it. The click of the mic button from the back seat. That was the very moment that I knew Walter and I had become a crew. Very professionally, and with no emotion, Walter spoke: “Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?” There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. “Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground.” I think it was the forty-two knots that I liked the best, so accurate and proud was Center to deliver that information without hesitation, and you just knew he was smiling. But the precise point at which I knew that Walt and I were going to be really good friends for a long time was when he keyed the mic once again to say, in his most fighter-pilot-like voice: “Ah, Center, much thanks, we’re showing closer to nineteen hundred on the money.” For a moment Walter was a god. And we finally heard a little crack in the armor of the Houston Center voice, when L.A.came back with, “Roger that Aspen, Your equipment is probably more accurate than ours. You boys have a good one.” It all had lasted for just moments, but in that short, memorable sprint across the southwest, the Navy had been flamed, all mortal airplanes on freq were forced to bow before the King of Speed, and more importantly, Walter and I had crossed the threshold of being a crew. A fine day’s work. We never heard another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast. For just one day, it truly was fun being the fastest guys out there.
Laughs in supercruise
Laughs in mach 3.2
Try to keep up.
The SR-71 has the speed, but Concorde has the endurance. :3
Fuckin wheee.
Just railgun the Europeans across the country
Speed doesn't hurt. Acceleration does. As long as it's made to accelerate reasonably slowly to reach that speed, you'll be fine.
Their low-soeed can't even stay on the rails. I think it may be some time before the once masters of rail enter the current century.
I looked at taking a train from Albuquerque to Denver for a concert, the trip takes 2-3 days and goes from Albuquerque toto Chicago to Denver and one way cost more than a round trip flight. For reference, it is a 7ish hour drive.
Their long hauls are definitely more vacation based, where the ride is part of the journey - and if you're not into that then I get how you feel. Amtrak has been doing a great job at refocusing on corridors. The east coast obviously, then they're working hard on a few key ones like:
Those are all shorter trips that don't make much sense to fly with how short it is, and with a few daily trips makes traveling between those cities much easier. Personally those are much better usages of Amtrak's time. I've taken the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver one multiple times and it's so much nicer than driving - but it's max 4 hours.
I wish they'd upgrade their long haul routes to go faster. There's one from SLC to SF I'm interested in, but it takes 18 hours, vs 11 by car or 2 by plane. If it was faster than driving, I'd consider it to avoid the airport.
I don't blame them for focusing on the easier trips though.
Same, but with the limited funding I get why. Shorter trips like that make money, long hauls don't - and since they don't own the tracks they can't even upgrade them or begin to do anything. I will say 18 is a lot (especially in a coach seat), but there is a positive of not having to drive. I usually take my steam deck and just zone out. Overnights though are tough in coach, for that you really have to want to be there.
Yeah, if I want to go anywhere interesting, it would be an overnight trip, with kids. A sleeping room is way too expensive, so it's a nonstarter. If it was 3x the speed, it would probably be fine, especially if they left in the morning instead of the evening.
So yeah, the only train I take is the commuter, and only to go to the airport because there's no connection from the train to my work (there's a way to get there, but the trip would take 2 hours each way). The commuter can't go very fast because it has to stop every 5-10 miles, but it's fine since it goes about as fast as a car.
So yeah, here's hoping Amtrak can make enough on the east coast to be able to upgrade the west coast.
I get that, but I was looking for an alternative to driving 14 hours round trip. Even if the trip took 7 hours each way, I am not driving it. But to go from 7 hours to 45 hours is insane. For a show on the 5th of November in Denver I have to leave Albuquerque on the 3rd, then leave Denver on the 6th to get back home on the 8th. $171 for the cheap seats each way.
I live near SLC and go get to San Francisco is about 18 hours, and that's a straight shot. Coach costs about $120, each way, which is about the same price as a non-budget airline. There's only one train each day and it runs from midnight to about 6PM the next day.
By car it's about 11 hours and about 2 hours by airplane.
So it's:
There are tons of places I just can't get to, like Las Vegas.
If I was retired or something when spending more time was totally fine, I'd consider taking the train. But as it stands, it's just not a practical option unless the train is the destination.
are you in the same school as this picard maneuver guy?
A 2 hour drive in Miami will get you to…north Miami
And 50$ in tolls lol
I remember driving out of Miami and even after an hour on the highway there were still exit signs for 10000th street or some shit like that. The American sprawl is difficult for Europeans to comprehend.
upvote for Gulf of Mexico
Ahem, it's the Gulf of America. Please get your facts right
why is this being downvoted, have y'all never heard of sarcasm?
Sorry, I should have tagged it properly.
Warning! Sarcasm ahead.
Ahem, it's the Gulf of America. Please get your facts right
Edit: Jerboa eating me tags. Let us try it this way:
<sarcasm>Ahem, it's the Gulf of America. Please get your facts right</sarcasm>
Edit2: while we're at it, why not try further
Edit3: Thanks for the gold, kind strangler stranger
It's a lazy joke that the other person already made better.
The sarcasm/joke is obvious, it just wasn't funny.
There is absolutely no way to determine if somebody is being facetious or serious over the Internet without further context. (Use a damn /s ffs)
Who could be serious saying that ??? (I don't think Donald is posting here onlemmy)
77 million people voted for trump in 2024. Even if you subtract the 50% that can't write, that leaves more than 38 million people who could seriously say this on Lemmy. Don't pretend that the orange clown ruined the country all by himself.
Have you seen the state of the world today?
Let's call it the gulf of middle earth
Nope, it's the Gulf of America. He said so. Now quit your anti-US retorics lest you be deported.
It's pronounced Gulf of Mexico
Is this one of those weird maps with the equator going through Florida?
Gondor is going to need a lot more aid to move that gulf to the middle...
Only if marlago is designated americas rectum.
Urectum
Damn near killed em.
Palm Beach is full of [rich] assholes so I would say this tracks.
Silly! The game you play when the facts keep changing and the rules don't matter
I sadly see this all the time unironically. Met a German family who arrived in North Carolina with plans to go to Disney Land. Not World. Land
"Isn't California just on the other side of the country?"
Yeah it is
How do people not check driving times in this modern age?
America is pretty unique in size. If you're used to shorter trips even overestimating wouldn't be half the drive through america. Especially Europeans as a long drive is anything over 20m when its measured in hours they're considering booking accommodations for sleep and such. The perception of time is incredibly different.
Unique in size? Lol the US is big, there are lots of other big countries
It's the second biggest "Western" country. It's about twice as big as the EU, about as big as the whole of Europe with about the same population, so it's mostly empty in the middle.
The obverse would be an American who wants to go to Europe, start out in Madrid, lunch in Copenhagen and fly back from Istambul.
But the US isn't unique in size. It's right next to two big countries, with Canada being even bigger, Europeand are familiar with Russia that's the biggest country in the world, it's not like people don't know about China, Brazil and how they're yuge...
Technically the US is unique in size. Name another nation that is 9.8 million km2. Canada is 10 million km2,Russia is 17.1 million km2, China is is 9.6 million...
So to say it is 'unique in size' is technically correct, the best kind of correct!
Hah well you got me there
Sure but the context of the discussion is Europe vs US
That's why I'm saying "second biggest", that doesn't mean it's unique.
European here, although our countries are smaller. 20 mins is quite obviously a short drive.
UK is pretty small but it still takes 7 Hours to get from Glasgow to london and I can't imagine anyone booking overnight accommodation for that drive. That's two major cities with 100% motorway/freeway driving, I haven't even brought up Cornwall.
I drive 5h for family within England on a monthly basis.
Your comment is naive.
Eh id still be inclined to stay over in Manchester or something to break that up, especially on holiday.
My family that still lives there stay overnight for trips like that. Me on the other hand: drove across Canada and would drive 4 hours, nap for 20 minutes, repeat...because hotels were expensive and my plan of campsite tenting overnight was just too much setup and take down after the first day.
Canada is as wide.... And in a sense longer because everything is so sparse.
The way I try to communicate it is to ask them to imagine someone taking a vacation to the whole EU, because America is much closer in scale to that
Had a friend from SE Asia that wanted to visit me in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She found a flight to Canada alright. To VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA. She asked if I could come pick her up if I wasn't too busy.
Lol.
3? I had a few crewmates cross the country in about 5 and they said that was a gruelling task that they should have slowed down for.
If you go through the US, Google Maps tells me about 56 hours, or 18-19 hours/day if you're doing it in 3. If you go through Canada only, add about 3 hours. I think Google Maps estimates are a bit generous on time esp. if you're comfortable exceeding the speed limit a bit, so maybe you could do it in 50 hours.
It's doable in 3, but it wouldn't be fun at all. I've done 14+ hours driving in a day (so 4 days?), and it sucks, so yeah, 5 might be a bit too much as well.
The most I've done continuously is 12. No stops but for gas, visiting my GF at college decades ago.
I've done 18 with the kids in the car. We made it to Disney at sun up and I lost the first day being to tired to go to the damn park. The kids slept overnight, but my wife and I were cooked.
I've done 14 fairly often but doing that every day would suck. I'm usually fine the next day (I do all the driving because I'd otherwise get carsick), but I don't think I'd be fine for 3 days.
A family member went ottawa-vancouver in 54 hours of driving - and this was using i-90 in America. The time estimates can be a bit off.
I'm guessing it doesn't count time at the border crossing or breaks, and assumes continuous driving.
The driver will need a nap at the end. I think it can be 72 hours if one doesn't sleep.
According to Google Maps, it's about 56 hours. Can't quite squeeze it into two days, but you could get close. If you're able to sustain 50% over the speed limit, you could maybe do it in 48 hours, with fuel refills.
You will need a cannonball run setup. But it's been done outrageously faster than you would think.
When I was in college at Eastern New Mexico, which is about 45 minutes west of Amarillo Texas, a couple friends, both from New England, had the bright idea of driving down to the gulf over a 4 day weekend.
I cautioned them against the idea, trying to explain Texas was bigger than they could imagine. Three hours into the trip we got a motel room in some hole in the wall town and went back to school the next morning.
What? It takes 24 hours to drive from the Canadian border to Mexico border. Texas is about 770 miles at its widest, that’s a breezy 10-12 hour drive doing the speed limit or just over.
Yeah so nearly half their weekend driving....through Texas. One of the most boring places to drive through.
24 hours out of 96. I’ve done worse.
And it can’t be worse than Saskatchewan.
The only place I've driven for multiple hours that was worse than Texas was Nevada. Even rural Indiana is a huge upgrade and that place stinks from soy bean processing (I think?)
Michigan and California are incredible.
Looking at Saskatchewan....I dunno man, looks really pretty to me!
Compared to the other provinces, it’s just flat farm fields. When the rapeseed (canola) is blooming it can look pretty, but it’s just yellow flowers for HOURS, no variety.
Edit, oh and for six months it’s white with snow, and the highway is dead straight, it’s hard to stay awake for the six hours.
Sounds like huge swaths of the Midwest US. My friend got into a wreck for the same reason you described (thankfully no one was hurt)
Northern Nevada sucks, but southern Nevada near Vegas is fine since it has cool rock structures and whatnot, provided you avoid rush hour.
I hate most of California because traffic is so awful, but north of SF is pretty.
Coming from a place with no desert or “beaches”, the sand is a cool difference from the rest of the drive down from Canada.
Wait, you're driving south through Nevada? Do yourself a favor and go east to I-15 or west to I-5, both are orders of magnitude better than going north/south through Nevada...
The only time I drive through Nevada is either from SLC to Lake Tahoe (northern Nevada) or SLC to Vegas/LA (southern tip of Nevada) because the alternative takes way longer.
You're assuming no traffic in major cities. I've gone from close to the Louisiana border to new Mexico and it took about 16 hours.
Do most cities not have bypasses? In Canada even most small towns have a bypass so you avoid the traffic lights.
It’s mostly for the semi traffic, the stopping and stopping ruins the roads, so they have a highway going around town to avoid that.
Those highways are often very congested too. It can take like 2 hours just to drive through Houston, even using the loops/beltways
I guess, but arguably you would only hit one in the day, and the chances of it being during rush hour is slim, can always plan better around that stuff too. Or take secondary highways. There’s not only a single highway going places.
Even during off-hours?
Nope, in America through-traffic goes right through the city center. Fortunately, many cities have innovated to solve this problem by bulldozing their city centers to build more stroads
That's not true in many parts of the country. It's very much a mixed bag. Look at San Antonio, 410 goes around the city and connects the various highways so you don't need to go through the city center to drive past the city. In Seattle, 405 was intended to do that for Seattle to avoid 15, but then Bellevue got huge. In SLC, we have 215.
Beltroutes are common across the country and are designed to solve exactly this problem.
Stroads are a different problem unconnected to highways going through cities. In fact, they're often the old highways that went through town and became a stroad when the highway was built. We then built more of them because people liked driving cars to their destination instead of walking or taking transit.
The best possible bypass won't solve the stroad problem or congestion in the city center. What we need is a complete redesign of what a city center means, which I think should be:
If we can do that, we can rip out stroads to make room for more density in attractions. Keep some roads for trucks to make deliveries and whatnot, and convert the rest to walkable streets.
Having exits isn't the same as "driving through downtown."
I do agree that we should redo how highways work, and part of that is having fewer exits, but what causes slowdowns isn't the quantity of exits, but the ability to get almost everywhere in a car. In other words, the number of exits are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The highway infrastructure is in the right place much of the time, the issue is the rest of the infrastructure.
We don't need more bypasses or lanes, we need driving to be less convenient than transit and walking for short trips. I think one simple change would improve things greatly: cut major arteries in the middle to prevent getting from one edge of the city to the other quickly by car. Basically, restrict those areas to delivery trucks, buses, and emergency services, and force the rest of the traffic to filter through side streets. Just that amount of inconvenience would push a bunch of people to use transit instead, and the areas cut off could be converted to a street.
I went on a cross Canada car drive in the early 2000s. We left from Sudbury Ontario to make it to the west coast in BC. We took our time, sight seeing and making many stops along the way. Ten days later we made it to Vancouver.
The best part was that on our sixth day, we ran into a friend in Medicine Hat, Alberta. He had left Kapuskasing, Ontario the day before and was expecting to make it to Vancouver in about 60 hours with non stop driving. His eyes were so blood shot and he was literally shaking from all the caffeine drinks, pills and coffee he had been taking. He had some strangers with him that he had picked up as hitch hikers and he said they were keeping him awake.
We worried about him the whole time but he called us two days later to say he made it. We caught up with him three days later.
I live in Arkansas and went on vacation to South Padre Island a few years ago. It's a 16 hour drive one way.
I grew up near Seattle and now live near Salt Lake City. The drive is 14 hours one way and I've done that trip at least a dozen times.
West Texas alone is an 8 hours between Las Cruces and San Antonio, and it's the same damn rock and shrub for the entire 8 hours.
We were headed Portales to Corpus Christi, which according to Apple Maps is about 9 1/2 hours. We did not have Apple Maps then, we had Rand McNally. So at best it would have taken us 11 hours. And yes everything looked the same.
Conversely, I, as an American who had the opportunity to spend a few months in Germany, was surprised at how close all the countries were.
Great culture in all the places I went (Brussels and Prague were my two standout favorites!) Traveling was hella cheap. The food was fire everywhere I went. The architecture was INCREDIBLE. And the knowledge that you could go to the hospital for less than $100 was nuts. Don't even get me started on how legitimately cool it is to sit in a 1000 year old pub.
I didn't want to come back. I nearly cried when I got the return flight info.
It still shocks me to tell people "Yeah, I lived in Germany for a bit and some weekends we would fuck off to France."
The borders of European countries are great because there's all this security infrastructure that they've built but then they don't use any of it. There's always just a bunch of ballads and you have to drive around little security checkpoints but there's never anyone around.
My personal favourite is Geneva which is kind of just an extended bit of Switzerland because the city was already there, but really by any logical sense it should be in France. So they deal with that by basically just ignoring it, and people just pop to and fro all the time.
There are often crossings where the infrastructure is a road-side sign. Interstate crossings at state borders are often more significant.
I submitted a job application once to Freiburg. One of the main reasons was that if I'm unhappy with the food selection, both France and Switzerland is something like 20kms away
I loved Prague too. Had a local guide that took me to cool places, I drank a lot. 👍
Tf is a mile, bruv? Don't come in 'ere with these nonsensical made up freedom units
Miles originated in Britain, so talk to them about their made-up nonsense.
At least they were eventually willing to give up the imperial system. I still don't understand why Americans never got on board with metric; it's so much easier.
Just watched a video which explains a few things.
Time zones start in UK because of some decent reasoning. France was also a contender for where timezones start for the same kinds of reasoning but conceded it in agreement that UK adopts the new metric system they created
Yeah, 'Muricans be like "B-but… the Brits…"
Like, yeah. They moved on. They evolved, changed their ways. USians hanging on to legacy units
If I remember my conversions right then a mile is 5280 kilometers. I hope that helps explain why Europeans would fear such a distance!
Tf. Why would anyone have a unit for that
"A benpu is 327 meters!"
…wait a minute… am I being made a fool of? Can't tell, cuz I don't comprehend dumb units. I'd legit buy that as a real thing, given how stupid those tend to be
A US customary mile is 5280 US customary feet. 1 US customary foot is 12 US customary inches. 1 US customary inch is 25.4mm. So a US customary mile is 1609344mm, exactly. It derives from the roman "mille passus", literally 1000 paces, where a pace is the distance between two impacts of the left (or right) foot of a Roman soldier on the march. Quite a few other cultures used a "mile" of some sort even after the fall of Rome, for example the old British imperial mile was 1760 British imperial yards, one British imperial yard predated the definition of the meter but was most precisely measured to be 0.914398415m, so the British imperial mile was 1609341.21mm. Other culture's miles varied even more than this.
Shout out the 1 hour 45 minute drive from JFK to just over the bridge into Jersey
There’s a reason why New Yorkers are much fitter than the average American lol.
Holy crap, just shoot me out a cannon, I'll get there sooner or die, either is preferable
Coming into the city through the tunnel was wild. Huge contrast in the amount of traffic.
I walked around Jersey City for Pokemon Go fest, and it was a ghost town. It was so surreal lol. Right off the PATH train there’s no one.
In OP’s image they “land” in NYC and drive to Miami. You would drive the route I posted to leave NYC.
"Would you like to try this alternate route that saves you negative 13 minutes and negative $5.44?"
could have this if politicians didn't fight high speed rail so much
I'm a fan of high speed rail too, but I also wonder if it's ever going to be comparable to flying for long distances like this.
Like, even traveling in a direct line on a plane (which averages 600mph, or 2-3x the average speed of high speed rail), it still takes 6 hours from NYC to LA.
Anything under about 500 km is better by train. While the train is slower, once you count getting to and from the airport and in and out of the plane, you're still faster overall. Above that the plane will usually be faster. If you take the environmental cost into account, the train always wins.
There's a direct train from Beijing to Kunming that's 11 hours, 1700 miles.
NYC to LA would be ~50% more, so you could do a high-speed sleeper.
But no, at that distance, flying is probably better.
Keep in mind that trains don't require extensive security checks and checking in times though.
[laughs in chinese]
In the US, I regularly caught domestic flights arriving <1hr before departure, I don't think a 18 hour high speed train can compete with a 6 hour flight.
Then again, I just looked at the high speed trains from Beijing to Kunming for the next few days, and while none of the trains are booked solid, a lot of business and first class seats are sold out or <10 left.
Meanwhile a flight goes for less than half the price and takes <4 hours.
So IDK why that route even exists, let alone why anyone would choose it over a plane, but apparently they do.
Do people take the train for the entire trip, or do most get on/off as it goes? I have used trains that cross the entire country (UK) before but never used them from start to end.
Yes, I hadn't thought of that.
Its difficult to get off the plane half way, though not impossible.
pfft tell that to avalanche and jessie rasberry
As soon as Elon Musk builds his Hyperloop, we'll be traveling from NYC to LA in just a few hours. /s
I've never considered myself claustrophobic, but the mockups of Hyperloop I've seen freak me out a little.
Not claustrophobic at all, but the idea of entering that engineering system has me bugging.
Honestly, if trains were 1/3 as fast as planes, I'd take them.
My family lives about 800 miles away (by car, less as the crow flies), which takes about 14 hours by car, 2.5 hours by plane, and 45 hours by train (36 moving time). To be fair, it covers more ground (almost 2x at ~1400 miles), but driving that same roite would only be ~22 hours. To make up for the extra distance, the train would need to go about twice the speed, so 120-150mph, to match driving, which is completely feasible. If I could do that trip via train in one day, I'd do it vs taking the plane.
I don't think expecting trains to go 2-3x the speed of cars is unreasonable. I'd still probably take an airplane for longer trips, but anything within 1k miles or so should be reasonable to do by rail.
commercial planes are a bit subsonic, you're asking for 300-400 km/h trains. high speed rail is like 200 km/h
Although it is true the definitions for high speed trains mention 200km/h, it is good to know many lines exist with 300km/h or above as speed limit (and the speed limit is regularly driven on these lines).
High speed rail is enough for medium size trips that I would normally drive. When driving isn't feasible (more than 800 miles or so), I'd need faster than typical high speed rail.
There is a point where planes become the better choice and transcontinental is definitely one of them.
If only the train autistic people had took over the country instead of the nazi ones.
With the distances provided, flying would be faster than high speed rail. Even if there was a maglev train from NYC to Miami, I think the flight would still be faster unless there were major delays flying out.
Those trains would have to be supersonic though, to do it all in one day.
You'd need a train going 1100mph (3x faster than the fastest current train) to make Miami to Las Vegas in 2 hours, but sure.
For reference that's like 1.5 times the speed of sound at sea level.
Oh look dear, the mach 1.5 train is going by again.
More like you would have your eardrums sent into a different dimension.
That looks like a fun gif, where'd ya get it?
It's from an anime called Chainsaw Man.
Fun fact: This scene is from the aftermath of the first and only attack by the devil named Gun, who stands in as a metaphor for gun violence (not very subtle, but that's the point)
Lol, in the manga I think it was crazier than this. There was just an immense scar across an entire continent in a straight line, as if a mile wide bulldozer just drove across everything. I don't remember if it targeted a government official or not, but I vaguely ::: spoiler spoiler remember control planting a piece of the gun devil as a lure. :::
The neighbors along the track didn't need windows anyway.
Ah, a meme from a simpler time. Now the first thing I think of is how long the stay in Guantanamo Bay will be.
Out of curiosity, I put the route in Google Maps to see how long each leg would take. 20 hrs., 37 hrs., 5 hrs.
You really can't experience everything if has to offer in just one day. I wish tourists could better understand.
If they make it all the way noon, I'd be surprised. Make a stop in Alligator Auschwitz.
Their transportation:
This is actually pretty similar to what some coworkers visiting from EU wanted to do.
They were here on a two week work trip and I asked them what they were doing for their weekend. It was something like "We rented a car and are going to go to New Orleans, then to Nashville, up to New York City, over to the Grand canyon, and maybe San Francisco if we have time before we head back to the office"
I had to explain that the state we were in was larger than their country and they couldn't cover that much ground in two days even if they only drove and didn't stop once.
We had a good laugh and then just did a hike on Saturday :)
Edit : "in Europe 100km is a long distance and in the US 100 years is a long time". Forget where I heard that but it seems accurate
I once saw a post from an American guy visiting family in Germany. They borrowed him a car so he could visit other family about 400KM away.
The family that owned the car spend an entire day getting it checked out by a mechanic, making sure all the fluids where fine, getting the tire pressure just right, etc.
He thought it was pretty funny because he drove double that distance every week just to go to work.
That is a British saying about Americans vs. Brits.
Or just save being put in an ICE facility and go visit Canada and not be put in an ICE facility.
Edit typo
My brother went to college in upstate NY in the 80’s and made friends with a girl who was born & raised in Manhattan. One weekend, in all seriousness, she suggested taking the subway to the Grand Canyon.
'80s
8'0s
I bet I know who she voted for
in the 80's what?
I like everything about this except the "being in the USA" part.
I had relatives over from wales visiting my grandmother in canberra. "Come, drive up for the day! "
Bitch i live in melbourne. The drive alone is longer than your entire "kingdom"
Ha, I had to drive 8 hours to get to the nearest airport when some one on site had a personal emergency
Wales is a principality. Victoria is about the same area as England btw.
Nope.
Victoria (Australia): About 228,000 km².
United Kingdom: About 243,610 km².
England: About 130,281 km².
Wales is a part of the UK, the "kingdom" of which i speak. Or did you think i was talking of the lands of Llywelyn the last?
(Btw: the uk is about 600km long. Melbs to canberra is 665km)
It's a constituent country of UK. Principality ended in the mid 1500s, and became an official country in 2011.
So, back in 2009, I lived in a tour bus touring with big acts like Linkin Park, Pearl Jam and guys like that. Well, we did a little stint with Madonna and we went from LA, straight to NYC, down to Miami and straight back to LA in I think about a week. It was one of the most brutal on road experiences I've ever had to endure for 4 shows. I was on a really sweet fully decked out tour bus too, so it was the best case scenario. It gave me a new appreciation for how motherfucking vast my country is. However, I would NOT recommend the experience.
I did get to meet Spike Lee and Chris Cornell in Miami tho and even had birthday cake with Justin Timberlake while in NYC. It was his birthday and he was doing a music thing inside our bus. He sat right next to me at the front of the bus and we talked about Pink Floyd. Super nice guy. It was a pretty wild week.
You have had an interesting life.
It's true. Im 40 now but i never had kids and chased my dreams from age 14. I dont tell any stories irl very much anymore because some people think I'm showing out or making shit up. Examples:
Whilst in all about road trips this fool better be driving at 1500mph to make these times
Mach 2 is very reasonable. Gillette makes a Mach 3.
What, your car doesn't do mach 3?
Have you heard of autobahn?
/j
We had family visit from the UK many years ago. They said after they visited Niagara Falls, they wanted to "pop over" to Prince Edward Island to see Anne of Green Gables. That is an 18h drive if you don't even stop to pee. They finally realized how big Canada really is when somebody showed them a map of England superimposed on a map of Canada.
I mean, it is also about how much time you have in the vacation and how much it feels like a "once in a lifetime" thing, where you take more hardships to check all the "highlights". Like, when we spend 2 weeks in Australia we drove crazy distances, because I don't know whether I will ever be there again. Same for US tourists in Europe, even in this thread "oh, we did Lissabon, London, Paris, Prague and Zagreb". No European would ever cram that into 4 weeks. But if you have the opportunity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When backpacking in China we went from Shanghai to the border of Tibet. Crazy distances again, but we wanted to cover snow capped mountains and Shanghai, solely because of "well, while we're at it". I mean, it felt like we already travelled half-way back home, only to come back to Shanghai to take the return trip.
Anyway, TL;DR: I don't think it's underestimating the size, but a FOMO on a "once in a lifetime" vacation.
it's actually not as bad as I thought it would be
It only assumes 120 km/h average speed for 55h
Remember that mapping programs only give "travel time", not "total trip time." that 19 hour drive from NY to FL is 19 hours in the car, on the highway. Realistically, that's a 2-3 day trip.
FL to NV is, likewise, 37 hours on the highway. So, same as your office job for a week, but instead of working you're just driving in a car.
With a little elbow grease and knowing where cops might be, you could work those numbers down. ;)
I have to have the road trip conversation with friends before we do anything. It's like, do we want to make this leisurely and the drive is fun, because that's going to need an itinerary and planned stops, or is the destination all that matters? Because I can make that 37 hour drive in about 38, give or take. Most of the time, I'd prefer it that way. Roadside destinations and 'gotta stop here' restaurants are always pretty lame, in my experience.
Ah, to be young and childless and have sufficient privilege where staying awake for a day and a half doesn't mess you up for the whole week
Clearly they've never heard of the cannonball run.
I would skip Florida. You won't miss much.
What are you talking about?
Mugging followed by incarceration and deportation is a great travel story!
"How was your holiday in America?"
"Good until the end. I didn't expect flights from Uganda to Munich to have so many layovers."
Well, getting mugged in Florida is different than in NYC.
The only subtropical part of the US?
It's uniqueness alone makes Florida special.
You do know Hawaii is part of the united states, correct?
I challenge you to drive or catch a train to Hawaii.
You cant drive or catch a train to everywhere, but it's still in the united states. That's the categorization in discussion
This is also in a thread about a road trip. That's the context.
I mean, sure if you're into repressive heat and humidity 10 months out of the year, clouds of potentially deadly but always annoying mosquitoes, ticks that inflict strange lifelong disabilities, sand everywhere imaginable and dreary mold literally growing on everything - it's fucking great!
It's nice to visit, I sure as hell wouldn't want to live there.
i mean they're already going to la so just skip florida and go to the far superior disneyland.
Florida's parks are way better than California's, and it's not even close...
Beg to differ. Easily one of the best vacations Ive ever been on. The cubans really made the best coffee. Just like Gabriel Iglesias said.
Europeans do be like that.
Meh, same with US folks visiting Europe, which is actually a common movie trope. I'm sure there's also plenty of people on both continents wo will think something through.
Yeah, we frequently get them in Norway. People who want a weekend trip to Oslo and drive to "the fjords" and back one day, or see stuff after 1500 in winter.
According to a map, Aurlandsfjord is about 4.5 hours drive from Oslo. You could probably see two of them in a day, with a fair amount of driving in between. You'd start around 6 AM and be back around 11PM, but it sounds feasible.
That's not that uncommon where I'm from. I've known people to drive up to Yellowstone from my area (Salt Lake City) for a day trip, which is about 5.5 hours each way. It's a long drive, but you could probably get to two different places within Yellowstone and be back by bedtime. Or if you stay over one night just outside the park, you can spend most of the day at the park before coming home.
Growing up, we'd drive from Seattle to Vancouver, CA a couple times a year for a day trip, and that's about 3 hours each way, depending on the border crossing. My parents would routinely drive from Seattle to Portland for tennis tournaments (not pro, just for fun), which is also about 3 hours each way. I sometimes drive from SLC to Cedar City to watch a play, which is about 3 hours each way. My coworkers drive from SLC to Wendover (1.5 hours) or Las Vegas (5.5 hours) to go gambling, though they usually stay 1-2 nights for Las Vegas.
Driving a few hours to see something is pretty common for Americans.
It's pretty common in the far north as well apparently, with some people claiming people are willing to drive for several hours just for a party.
In the central east, people generally aren't willing to spend all day in a car. A couple of hours drive is acceptable, but once you're at ~5 hours we generally expect to spend the night there. And to not leave at 0600 in the morning:)
As a bonus, some of those mountain passes can be a bit finicky, so they're often good to … not plan very optimistically.
I imagine there's similar sentiment in larger cities (NYC, LA, etc) vs more rural areas here in the US. I grew up in a less densely populated area, so driving long distances was just what we did.
Just to compare
Sure, "TIL Europe is only seven countries." Try the same but go Amsterdam -> Riga -> Athens -> Lisbon -> Amsterdam it's 8000 km in a straight line. Europe might be smaller than North America, but it's not that small.
In the US, the equivalent would be: Seattle -> Boston -> Miami -> San Diego -> Seattle. That's 8500 miles (~13,000 km), and doesn't even go to Alaska or Hawaii. I don't think you can drive around Alaska, but if you could, it would be a similar distance.
Europe isn't small, but it is a lot smaller than the US.
The US is a little below 10.000.000 km³, Europe is a little over 10.000.000 km³. I didn't go to Russia, the UK, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden.
Huh, I always forget that a large chunk of Russia is part of Europe. I've never understood the demarcation between Europe and Asia, I think it should be considered one continent.
If we only count the EU (which I think most refer to when they say they're visiting "Europe"), it's a bit less than half the area at 4,225,104 km2. Maybe round up to 5,000,000 km and include Norway, the UK, and Switzerland, and maybe some of the Baltic states (would probably push to 5.5M km).
I think the reason it is considered a separate continent is due a western centric view, and not geographically motivated. If you look at it, it's mostly where the white people originally lived.
Also, the EU includes some overseas territories which aren't in Europe like Saint Martin and the Canary Islands.
Quick edit; from Saint Martin to Réunion is 13.600 km, and both are in the EU :p.
Apparently Guam to US Virgin Islands is 9,509.97 miles, or a bit over 15k km. 😜
So this map inspired me to come up with a possible American equivalent of the OP. Apparently from London -> Paris -> Madrid -> Rome -> Berlin would be 53 hours, pretty close to the 55-56 hours I see others in this thread quoting for the NY etc. to LA trip.
Alternatively, you could end in Athens instead of Berlin for a 57 hour trip. That one's kind of neat because it's like a mirror image of the OP, downward at an angle to a peninsula, then go horizontal-ish.
To make a loop like yours, one can go Amsterdam -> Paris -> Barcelona -> Rome -> Berlin -> Amsterdam with a travel time of 52 hrs. Add Vienna between Rome and Berlin for an estimated time of 55 hrs.
I can drive for two hours and still be in the same roundabout.
I can drive 7 hours and still be on the same roundabout.
I can drive 2 hours in still be in Austin.
could that really be called driving?
I had a car like that once.
I can drive two hours and still be in my county! (It’s stupid).
More like 190 or so.
That's not really impressive. I can drive 5 hours and still be in the same state. In Germany.
Dam, if I drive an hour the right direction in in Sweden
Same here, but that's where I started.
I'm actually curious. Putting aside alaska, is there any competition for longest highway in a state? I could imagine florida and california both having roads that could rival texas' longest. Maybe if it's a really windy one in montana or wisconsin.
Not to brag, but the longest Road in Europe is 8641km (5369 miles) long. Though to be fair, it's only partially in Europe, the last 4000 (±1000 as there's no clear border between Europe and Asia) kilometers are in Asia. The longest road that is completely in Europe is only 5190 km (3225 miles) long.
I can drive 2h and be in jail (I don't have my driver's license).
I'd guess you could find a 2 hour straight line in any state without crossing a border, except maybe Rhode Island.
Looks like Delaware might just qualify as well, and Connecticut if it actually had a major roadway on the diagonal from the SW to NE might as well, but the routing Google is giving me goes just over 2h
Haha yes!
I remember travelling to family in Canada and asking if we could go to Disneyland. In Florida.
Disney Land is in California.
World is in Florida
Shows what my 12 year old mind knows.
Don't you have to be at least 13 to post on Lemmy
Does Lemmy follow laws? Thats new. The hivemind doesn't adhere to your human constructs.
It takes like a week to drive from NY to CA.
Realistically 4 days with ~12 hour drives will get you there including lunch and gas stops.
Something like NY - Toledo - Omaha - SLC - SF
Sure it might look easy on a map but driving 2,000+ miles all at once can be pretty hard on a car & a human. Don't be surprised if you need to stop for an oil change, new tires, alignment, fix cracks in the windshield from 18-wheelers kicking up rocks. Then there's weather & natural disasters, physical limitations, hands & butt go numb driving 12 hours straight, need to take breaks for physical exercise & sanity checks. I've driven across USA 5x. At least three of those things happened each time. Budget AT LEAST 7 days.
How the fuck do you need an oil change, tyres, and wheel alignment over that short distance? I could understand needing one of those if the trip was short notice and you didn't have time to do it before leaving, but all three are ridiculous.
Also, unless your driver's seat is a plank, no, your butt doesn't go numb.
Lol I was reading that and wondering if the op was driving a 1930s ford with all his belongings strapped to the top.
The Joad family off to California.
Right? Most of those are all the kinds of regular maintenance things you button up BEFORE a long trip. Windshield cracks are usually either quick fixes or fixes that can be delayed or patched until you finish the trip.
Frequent enough stops to limits butt pain and blood clots isn't such a bad idea though.
You have no right to tell me what my butt does or doesn't do.
This gotta be from mapporncirclejerk, right? Right?
Don't do it, America sucks right now.
Europeans: METRIC MAKES EVERY MEASUREMENT COMPREHENDABLE
ALSO EUROPEANS:
Well it probably doeant help that nothing in the states is metric lol
Youre more likely to find a map measured in football fields or hamburgers at most places
Maps measure in miles AND kilometers here you have no excuse
Its all beans mate
Edit: about 350,000,000 wide
That's a lot of toast
Speaking of by large distances, how long was it after the USA walked on the moon until any country in Europe did?
The Saturn V is a great example of German engineering.
Exactly "nobody cares" years
Y'all seem to have gotten so butthurt you assumed i wasnt american. Big oof lmao. Have fun with that
LGTM!
Why would you even go there ? Go to Canada
Oh boy, someone is about to have a lesson in scale.
A guy I work with is in Germany. He came to the US for a work meeting. He intended to stay in the US for another week and a half, with plans to rent a car and drive ... basically this route. With all sorts of sightseeing and tourist stops along the way.
Suffice it to say that he did not.
Vegas sucks though.
Itinerary Anarchy
Multiply those time estimates by about 20.
Why not pop over and see Montana while you're here?
Just take a quick drive to Alaska too
Don't miss out on Hawaii! It's just a short ferry ride away.
Hop, skip, and a jump away!
I mean I did think road trips were feasible before looking them up not to get dragged into the idea too early, but even then I didn't think it would be a day. In my mind it was like a week at least.
The dream could be realized if America actually had high speed rail, but that would require investing our taxes into real infrastructure instead of state-sponsored terrorism.
Yeah no, even a jet couldn't get those travel times. Or when people plus them.
And here in the comments you will read once again the problem of USA about railways. Take some popcorn.
lol the problem with America is fascism
Which funny enough is part of the reason they don't have trains. Some dickhead fascist billionaire charmed the simple brained with magic transportation, so they wouldn't invest in high speed rail anymore. Go figure
Yeah it’s all connected. But whenever I say that I sound like a conspiracy theorist to most people
Still USA citizens won't and can't do anything, because they never do.
I’m so sad about the state of the world. At this point I’m resigned to enjoy as much of it as I can while making as little impact as possible then noping out and letting morons continue with their bullshit charade as the planet burns around them
Sensible Americans (a vanishing breed, but still) agree that high speed rail is both doable and practical across the US.
Take the Amtrak at Penn Station at this point
WTH would you go all the way to miami? Stop in orlando, get some disney on and leave save 6 hours.
*European educated in the US
FTFY