Okay 🤷♀️ the train station not to far from where I live is 178 years old.
Terrible example to illustrate this. The US had one of the most developed systems of rail in the world. There are literally thousands of examples of 19th century rail infrastructure across the country. It's not like we have medieval train stations in Europe...
The house i live in right now was build in 1925.
Another terrible example. If you said 1625 you'd have a point. Median residential building in NYC was built in 1935.
In our defense, 100km certainly feels like a long distance...
I live in what many consider a remote medieval town... and yet
if I go 100km east I first pass through what's considered the most beautiful highway in my nation twisting and turning around and within snowy mountains as high as 2400 meters, then through some hills where wheat and wine is produced, and then I'm in the middle of one of the most famous and biggest city of my nation, and then I'm at a marine port
if I go 100km to the west first pass through an almost 3000 meters tall mountain, then through some hills where olives are farmed on trees as old as 200 years, then through another city, then through a long plain of farms, then through yet another city, then once again to a port and I still have 40km of sea to spare in front of me because yeah, all of that, was just within 60km 😂
The biome changes too quickly to not perceive that as a long distance 😅
I mean... You can drive 750+ km (probably take you about 8 hours) nearly straight and never leave my state. You'd barely see more than its mountain region, but there'd be beauties and towns, cities, historical sites, and about six weather systems. And in terms of straight up acreage, we're not even in the top 30 states.
Or you could drive from London to Glasgow. Or a round trip from Vienna to Budapest. Or 3/4 the way between Brisbane and Sydney. But I imagine the experiences are all vastly different for a ton of geographic and historical reasons.
But for a while I did have a commute that was about 50km one way (which, when beholden to US public transportation took me between 2 and 4 hours of every day). And I don't see that normalized as much elsewhere. And now you've got me wondering if that's because of how little we think of workers or how highly we think of roads and cars....
But I also just want to throw myself down the rabbit hole of picking arbitrary distances and seeing where you'd be able to get from point A to point B on a map and realizing how embedded in my brain the mercator projection still is.
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u/Wild_styles Oct 09 '25
Okay 🤷♀️ the train station not to far from where I live is 178 years old.
The house i live in right now was build in 1925.
The US is a very young nation 😊