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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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This is why Europeans don't grasp how big the U.S. is. It's a minimum of 33 hours driving from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Their entire country is a day trip from home.
We do understand that, don’t you worry.
You’d be surprised. So many Europeans (and Americans) think they can do little day trips in Australia to places multiple days of non-stop driving away.
Europeans in America are always like "The Grand Canyon is beautiful! Now let's drive over to see the Statue of Liberty!"
Just teasing, I love you Europeans
It is cause there is nothing to do in-between.
It is all empty.
Our brain can't wrap around that.
Sure, but so often it's "Americans are complicit idiots since half the country doesn't simply protest in the same city" and "dumb car-brained Americans won't even build highspeed rail between LA and NYC" 🙄
Even smaller-scale things like the definition of rural are so drastically different from places like the UK that they just don't translate.
The distances and population density differences are huge but simultaneously subtle enough that reasonable-ish sounding yet wildly impractical takes are a common occurrence online.
I mean the rail system in the US could definitely be better. Like NYC to LA on Amtrak is scheduled for nearly 3 days of travel and since it's Amtrak you're probably going to be 4 hours late in Chicago and LA so closer to 4 days. For reference NYC to LA on Greyhound is scheduled at the same amount of time but you'd have to be an idiot to think Greyhound is getting you anywhere close to on time.
Even if you could solve the impossible land acquisition problem and build non-stop highspeed rail in a straight line between LA and NYC, it'd still be much faster to fly the ~2500 miles than to take a train. It's 6 hour flight vs a well over 12 hour train ride.
Passenger rail doesn't exist on that scale in the US because it's prohibitively expensive and, even if it were free, obsolete at that distance. It could be better for intrastate or travel on along the coast, but then you run into the land and cost issues. See: California working on this for nearly a decade.
Yeah high speed rail across the country is pretty infeasible but the current service is really bad and that's what I was addressing.
A train service should be faster than a bus on the same distance if for no other reason than the bus is going to have more frequent stops. Amtrak saying they can't do coast any faster than Greyhound should be embarrassing.
You do realise when you say stuff like this that Europe, by the conventional understanding of it extending to the Ural Mountains, is still bigger than the US by around 300.000 square kilometres right? Europeans do know how big it is.
„But tourists…“ people don’t have the capacity to comprehend scale in unfamiliar environments. The New Zealand subreddit gets all sorts of nationalities asking if they can do crazy shit like drive from Auckland to Queenstown in a day.
Which is amazing, because you can check that on Google maps in seconds.
Lisbon to Helsinki takes 47 hours of driving btw.
And you haven't even reached far North yet, there's still 1000+ km of Finland remaining.
Yeah but nobody would even consider driving from Lisbon to Helsinki if the goal is just to get from A to B; you'd make that trip by plane.
Yup, but hardly anyone in the US decides to do Atlantic to Pacific road trips either.
Plenty of people in the US do this.
As a teenager/college student to have the experience, yes.
And then there’s families who do this, again for the experience. It's an American Rite of Passage without question.
But on the regular, LA to NY, ya gonna fly.
Only because gas was probably cheaper than water, but that changed recently.
Yep. And because people in the US have a weird sense that their time has no value.
Europeans think 200km is a long distance. Americans think 200 years is a long time. /jk
Most people dont have to drive from new york to los angeles or similar, thats 42 hours, but we have similar distances in europe as well. The longest ive driven was about 30 hours(dont even ask, thats too much even for me) but a friend of mine and their family had to drive down from åre to barcelona which google maps says is 37 hours. I think it took four days for them. Also from where i am right now, kiruna, a very northern city in sweden, is 18 hours away. The lomgest drive in sweden wothout going through another country is 22 hours so the us being larger isnt a very valid argument. If you look at the entirity of europe its larger than the us and the distances are longer but what actually matters is the population density. When comparing the contiguous us and the eu for example the population density is double in the eu while the whole of europe has a population density about 50% higher than the us.