this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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Europe is relatively small but their towns are waaay more compact because they were built before cars came around so most towns are already in favor of walking/biking distances.
But yeah America is huuuge. The drive from Paris to central Switzerland is about 12 and a half hours and it's a total change of scenery. For the US that's just California to Utah. Or Washington DC to Charleston SC.
What the US needs badly is high speed rail from city to city
I mean we do need that, but that has nothing to do with the problem. the majority of people don't live in those vast expanses of nothingness. Most of our cities are just as populated as most European cities, we just have shit laws around zoning, single family housing, population density, NIMBYs blocking any change, and people that think public transit is for poor people. They don't travel to other countries and so have no clue how good things could actually be.
Yeah above all else I think that is the biggest issue. There are daft rules about the size of carparks that mean that, what would be a local store in the EU, becomes this vast strip mall in the US with 12 acres of parking lot to walk across so you can get your milk.
You practically need a car to just drive across the vast expanses of car infrastructure. Crossing the road in the US is something you have to plan your day around
Yeah, it's a shithole country which is why I got rid of my car, let my driver's license expire, and left the country. Looking back, it was pretty prescient considering how fascism-y it has gotten there.
Or California to California
In, roughly, 12 hours I can get from pennsylvania to florida. DC to Charleston should not take that long.
Yeah but you did just describe massive changes in scenery in America. You can do 12 hours of the same here for sure, the great plains are really big, but usually 12 hours of driving later the scenery has changed. It's 14 hours from Duluth Minnesota which is on Lake Superior to Sundance Wyoming which has the devil's tower monument and is past the great long stretches of nothing that makes up the bulk of the Dakotas. Des Moines is a city surrounded by nothing but corn and open road (with a distinct feel from the Dakotas) and is 12 hours from Memphis Tennessee which is adjacent to Appalachia. Baltimore Maryland, a coastal city on the Chesapeake Bay and near a bunch of swamps driving 12 hours west and north can get you into and out of the Appalachian Mountains (and not a short cut of them), barely dodging Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo (with an optional roller coaster detour at Sandusky) while you hug Lake Erie, do the entire border of Michigan and Indiana before landing in Michigan City, Indiana on Lake Michigan, which looks like it's just outside Chicagoland.
And out of curiosity I checked what a cross country trip looks like, NYC to Los Angeles is 50 hours, while the longest road trip between frequent destinations is Key West to Seattle at 63 hours. The latter of these begins on a tropical island, goes through swamps, deep south agricultural areas, Appalachia, Midwestern agriculture, the Mississippi River, Midwest agriculture, great plains, badlands, Rockies, pnw valleys, cascade mountains, and ends in a rainy ass wetlands, but this one has wild disparity between day length over the year.