The US tends to be a lot more spread out than Europe and the rest of the world. It seems like we’re also more likely to move long distances for jobs and the like.
I’m pretty close to most family, 10 to 40 minute drives for everyone that doesn’t live out of state
It’s good you clarified the UK. 3h30 on a train in the US gets you to about the next town over 😢
It’s not quite that bad, but I’ve really wanted to take Amtrak cross country, which should in theory be easy to do because of all our open land. And yet, it would take like a week or something ridiculous like that.
If I lived in mainland Europe the journey would probably be a bit quicker for a journey of similar distance, everything seems to go via London in this country and we’ve got some creaking infrastructure. However I’ve heard the trains in the US are particularly under funded, so this might be a tiny violin situation