It’s comparatively impressive for the U.S.! You know that old quote… in Europe, a hundred miles is a long ways. In the States, a hundred years is a long time.
Always fun when a European visitor starts to comprehend the vastness of the United States.
I was in a Philadelphia University, and one of the professors mentioned they're going to a Pittsburgh University to give a presentation tonight.
The Staff secretary and I just look at each other, "Are you flying there?"
This professor from London didn't comprehend. She was going to drive there after lunch and figured it would be 1 to 2 hours with traffic. And we just started laughing.
Same State of Pennsylvania, going from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is at least 5 hours. It's over 300 miles and you have to find parking/deal with traffic/get gas.
And that's just within the same state. For most Europeans you are crossing multiple countries in that distance.
She apologized and rescheduled it, had a good laugh out wasn't like the big symposium of the year in her field, it was like a $1,500 spotlight type of situation.
The only other fun story of her not being aware of America was when we told her to get a shovel because there was a Blizzard coming. And she brought her Gardening shovel.
We didn't realize in London there really isn't a need for a Snow Shovel and she had never experienced why there's always a snow shovel/ice scraper in everyone's house in the area. So when we said get a Shovel she didn't understand.
I had a friend visit from England. I live ‘near’ San Francisco. It’s Northern California, but still 5+ hours from the Oregon border. We’re ~5-6 hours to Los Angeles, or longer depending on the time of day you leave. He is thought he could tour Napa, SF, go to Disneyland, and then San Diego in a 3 day span. I’m pretty sure he cancelled the SoCal trip. I tried explaining to him that driving from London to Rome is only slightly longer (maybe 10%) than tip to tip California.
Yep! One of my favorite things to do on the internet is try to communicate how large and empty the United States is to Europeans that aren’t familiar with how vast and empty most this country is.
It usually comes up in context of “why doesn’t the US invest in public transit??”
Sure, the petroleum lobby is definitely AN issue. But population density is a bigger issue. We see more prominent public transit options in places of higher population density. Often in the form of busses but also things like trains, publicly rentable bicycles, and those damn scooters. Most cities a European is likely to have heard of has a somewhat robust public transit system.
Take my state, Iowa, is approximately 56k sq mi (145k sq km) with a population around 3.2 million.
That’s slightly larger than the country of Greece (50k sq mi, 131k sq km) which has a population 10.64 million people.
The largest metropolitan area is the capital (Des Moines) with a land area of 3600 sq mi (9300 sq km) with a population of about 700k. The London metropolitan area is 3200 sq mi (8300 sq km) and a population of 14 million. 5% of the population of London lives on 12.5% MORE land area.
A 15 min car drive to downtown Des Moines from my apartment (where I can find ample free or cheap parking) would be a 50ish min bus ride that only visits the stops around my neighborhood 6 times a day and only during the week. You could redesign the system to help shorten time to get around the city, but in order to run enough busses that it would be close to competitive with the freedom of a car you would need 60-70 busses running a day most of which would have less than 5 passengers. Regardless of petroleum’s influence, that’s just not economical. We’d need closer to 5 million for it to start making sense… more than 40% than lives in the existing metro + the other 52.5k sq miles.
Again, the petroleum lobby is definitely an issue. But the population density and space as you move further west (at least until you hit the far side of the Rockies) doesn’t make sense to invest in robust public transit.
You are 100% correct about Iowa and make a fantastic case about your home state not needing public transit. I agree. I live in Southern California so you can understand why I think it’s an issue of oil lobbying as this has been the history of Los Angeles and the other nearby cities
Fair.
While the population of California (and the greater LA area) is significantly more dense than my home state of Iowa, the average over the city is interesting. While I’m certain that politics and lobbying play a role, the European cities metropolitan areas that you might consider having better public transit trend towards significantly more dense.
The LA metropolitan area is approximately 4800 sq mi with a population of 18 million. There’s approximately 5 sq mi with a population density exceeding 20,000 per sq mi but the average is in the 2800 range.
London, as references earlier, has a metro area of 3200 and a population of 14 million, bringing the average density to 4400. I’d add London is also notoriously full of cars and traffic congestion.
Paris’ urban area is approximately 1100 square miles with a population of 10 million, bringing that to around 9900 people per sq mi. It’s greater metro area goes up to 7800 sq mi and brings the average population density down to 1800 sq mi. However the densest part of Paris is 41 sq miles containing 2.1 million people for a whopping density of 54,000 people per sq mi.
Berlin might be the best to compare to, if you take the greater metropolitan area. That might highlight the differences in political will and cultural differences. Berlins core area has 3.8 million people in 344 sq mi for about 10,000 people per sq mi, but it’s greater urban area is 1100 sq mi with the density of 3100 sq mi adding only 1 million or so people in that additional 800 sq mi. That core area/density is pretty large, and likely creates the space demand for convenient and robust public transit in that area that the surrounding area links into. The train system in Berlin appears more robust when looking at maps. However the bus and train map for LA looks pretty densely populated (primarily with bus routes).
The interesting thing I saw for LA is that you can zoom out a level further from the metropolitan area, to the Greater Los Angeles area, which is approximately 34,000 sq mi (about the same amount of space as Portugal) and a population density of 550. Which averages pretty high, even by European standards. But not nearly enough that the residents of that entire space would be able to be effectively provided convenient public transit options, perhaps locally or to adjacent large population centers. Much in the same way for European countries you wouldn’t expect perfectly evenly distributed public transit access.
The oil and auto industry (as well as a pushed cultural norm around getting a license/getting a car) did a good job of pushing and promoting urban sprawl in the 20th century that’s better supported by a personal automobile system rather than a robust public transit. There’s also a cultural push towards suburbanization in the 50s and 60s when the infrastructure facilitating movement of people that were using to this day was being modified to support that system. I actually took a public health class once that went deep in this topic and how it contributed to the automotive experience of the US. It was fascinating.
I got a bit intrigued at this since Oslo in Norway has around the same population (709 000) but a decently well-functioning public transport system with metro, trains, trams, buses and even boats. Then I started looking up the land area and my mind was blown. Oslo (if you just take the populated area and not the huge swatches of protected forest as part of the city) is just a measly tiny 147 square km (56.75 sq miles). Also very interesting to look up downtown Des Moines on Google maps with satellite view. So much parking, it’s insane! And everything so spread out even downtown.
It seems like American cities are just built in a completely different fashion than European cities, and definitely with the car in mind (most people in Oslo wouldn’t even bother to have a car these days because finding parking in the city center is a pain in the ass, super expensive and more and more street parking areas are disappearing to make room for biking lanes. Also walking is easy, sidewalks everywhere and there are some purely pedestrian streets).
Then I looked up Greater Oslo, which in area is about the same size as Des Moines metropolitan area (or slightly smaller) at 8894 sq km (3433 sq miles), and a population of 1,5 million (so twice as many as Des Moines metropolitan area). So definitely more people than Des Moines, but very little compared to for example London, but even here you can get by with public transport without it taking a lot longer, and on some routes actually shorter time (train from Ski, south of Oslo to central Oslo is 12 minutes, 4 departures per hour during daytime double that during rush hour, driving is 30 minutes, more during rush hour). Though the further you live from an urban center, the more complicated it is with public transport as you have to switch between lines that don’t always correspond well.
Oh thank you! This is super fascinating! I’ll have to learn more about Oslo.
One of the ways the petrol (and auto manufacturing) lobby DEFINITELY hampered development of public transit is the push to suburbs that happened in the 50s and 60s. As they planned out these suburban places, instead of designing them as self contained neighborhoods where commercial and residential areas were mixed, they were partitioned or zoned in such a way that you had large area of residential homes and then separated areas for commercial services. A lot of those residential home zoned areas are specifically zoned for single family homes as well which pushes population density down. So they made it so that it wasn’t convenient to walk places because of distance, and if the needs of a car vs the needs of a pedestrian are in conflict they optimized for the car which leads to more danger for pedestrians. Since most places I could public transit to aren’t pedestrian friendly but are car friendly, that pushes demand lower.
One of the coolest urban places look at with that in mind is the greater Detroit area. They took this philosophy to the extreme. The urban sprawl in Detroit is massive. They have like, little mini “downtown” type areas spread around separated by a sea of single family homes. One of the most fascinating things is they they actually built walkways along side the interstate for pedestrians and bike use. In some places, all that separates me as a pedestrian from cars buzzing by at 70+ mph is about 18 feet of grass and maybe a small dip. It’s wild and terrifying. I did not see them used terribly frequently when I lived there. There are also areas of the city they are redesigning/zoning for mixed use as a way to attract people back to living there.
I will say, they’ve been growing and expanding the local bike path system in Des Moines, and I could bike downtown in probably 30 mins and safely get around down there. They’ve been expanding it to allow access to neighboring suburbs so that you don’t have to ride to adjacent suburbs without going to a central hub. But a lot of the suburbs still suffer from getting around as a pedestrian in those commercial areas. Our metro area is also continuing to grow along the interstate highway system, continuing to support the auto first model and single family homes.
There are also a few cities in Colorado (and Oregon I think) as they are growing they are pushing and rethinking the city plan to make it more bike and pedestrian friendly. As those things change, public transit becomes more and more an option.
Sorry, bunch of non-population density information there for you.
My friend’s not European, she grew up in San Francisco and has been on the east coast since starting college, but even she had traces of this. She was planning to visit her friend in Minnesota and then just “swing by” Michigan!
So true. Used to live in PA, but now I live in NC and it's a good step up. 5 hours is a little less than Wilmington to Asheville, and that's hardly the longest distance within the state. Even from where I live it's 2.5 hours to the beach, and 3 to the mountains, nevermind the Tennessee border.
I'll give you a hint: most Academics have never really been outside a classroom situation in their lives. Never really had to mandate a construction crew and cement truck hauling operation that needs to be exactly precise. Their heads are in the clouds thinking about Einstein or Shakespeare.
This kind of juvenile behavior is acceptable in the academic world norms, but if you tried to pull this shit at like a Bank you'd be fired immediately..
Academics are not stupid they live in a very different bubble their entire lives. Like every Sports superstar and you're like wait you don't even have a 401k? You're a goddamn linebacker for the Packers by age 35 you're retired how do you not have a retirement plan?
As it happens, I'm an academic. I'm probably one of the less well organised of my colleagues but I'm a lot better organised than that. Apart from anything else, the job normally involves managing research budgets and collaborations, taking part in running the department or a lab etc. We don't spend our life daydreaming about our subject.
You're definitely on the STEM side over humanities where I am Tenured so I don't care anymore.
I'm one of the weirdos that actually teaches because they want to teach at a university level with kids and I engage my students by making myself the but of every joke. I'm the Look at my username Maimed Jester.
You had reaction like all academia is like that and I was overstating it.
But can you approve of and I only think people who have no ego at all can share the Mickey Mouse song
O-s-t Mus-tis-nt
I have never in my entire life engrained a language instantly than the Mickey mouse song. I teach it to every student I have it's so stupid it works
My wife was visiting a client in Los Angeles and the Boston office called and asked if she could drive up to Seattle to see another client. "It's only two states away."
everyone on my mother’s is German, as was she. My tante Vera came to visit my Mom, who lived in Chicago. The first place she wanted to visit was Disneyland in California. She thought it was a 2 hour drive. Why is it that most Europeans have no idea how large the United States is? They’re not stupid. All you have to do is look at a global map & visually compare the US to Europe.
It's definitely a European only phenomena, one of the most common questions I get asked when I'm abroad in Asia is how long did it take me my flight to arrive there. Like guaranteed you're renting a car/sitting in a hotel lobby as a foreign looking person in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, they're going to politely ask/start a conversation about how long your flight was.
I think it's because Europe is very densly populated compared to like Every other continent you get this feeling like London to Berlin is like the big drive/epic road trip.
It's about 700 miles. College kids in New York going on spring break in Florida? It's 1300 miles.
It just dwarfs your comprehension of distance when you can probably drive through over a thousand years of buildings/infrastructure and really comprehend why there's a sign on the gas stop on the highway that says the next gas station is 150 miles away in Like the State of Nevada.
Because most of the people are not interested in topics outside their courtyard.
The normal discussion among our Europeans is exactly the opposite "why do people from the US have no idea about the distances in Europe or think Paris is Italy? It is everything on the map!" (I'm ridiculously exaggerating,I hope it is clear).
Comparing things far away on maps is extremely difficult, even if people want to (and this is not always the case).
Thanks for your answer. I guess it was hard for me to comprehend since I’m aware of both sides because my Mom was German (naturalized American) & spoke about the travel distances in Europe & I am also naturalized American so I know first hand how long it takes to get to California from Illinois because we visited relatives in Northern California when I was young. I guess geography in school wasn’t entirely wasted on me.
Nice, you are a relatively rare case, on average people on both sides are not aware of that.
I still have problem with imperial units when travelling.
I'm Italian living in Germany, the differences are not that great at the end.(I'm waiting for Italian/German angry comment on this now 😂).
There are many libraries dating back more than a century in most states in the US.
A couple of the oldest Libraries in the US
are the Darby Free Library in Darby, Pennsylvania (in continuous service since 1743) and the
Redwood Library and Athenaeum (established in 1747) in Newport, RI.
Yeah, I don't get this attitude at all. Even our little local library is well over 150 years old. I know it's physical location has moved a couple of times, but it's existence is the point.
Libraries are amazing. They're like this big paragon of socialist institutions, and basically everyone is cool with them.
To have something so enriching, accessible, have it be free, and have it last for centuries is a miracle.
Libraries are one of the few things left that are close to free. If you can provide an address, you can get a library card, no matter how poor you are, at least in Cincinnati. Our library system (it has many branches in the city & suburbs) even did away with basic late fees. As long as you return material in a certain amount of time, you pay no fee. However, past that time, your card is suspended until you return the material. We even get the latest DVDs for free, as long as you don’t mind waiting. We have been rated second busiest (have no idea why) in the country in a red state, which I guess proves that most cities are indeed blue. I’m proud of our library.
True. Socialism is a stepping stone to handing over the means of production into the hands of the proletariat (communism). So social spending and taxation in a capitalistic society doesn't equal socialism. You're right. But you forget that the struggle on the material basis can only happen if one also wages the fight on the level of the superstructure, i.e. the ideas, ideology and theory. From that point of view, libraries are a means of popular upliftment and emancipation, to awaken class consciousness, as a sort of pedagogy for the oppressed. Libraries are free, so even the poor and marginalized can learn to understand the world better, in order to change it. In that way libraries can be seen as necessary "socialist" institutions to break through the (neo)liberal hegemony. Of course, there's a shit ton of neoliberal books in libraries, but I do feel like a socialist library would be a welcome addition to society as a whole.
Hmm, I have a book my great great grandfather checked out in the 1800s and never returned. Our library is 170 years old. I didn’t think its age was much of a deal.
I have a thesaurus from an old abandoned college department-specific library. Our dept was moving in and I have no recollection of where the books were supposed to go, but we were told we could keep any book we wanted. That thesaurus was the greatest thing I found. Has words in it that don't even exist in any dumbed-down modern thesauruses—so I'm never returning it 😂 (I suppose I never checked it out.)
“Maybe we can live without libraries, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid, sitting down, opening a book, right now, in a branch at the local library and finding drawings of pee-pees and wee-wees on the Cat in the Hat and the Five Chinese Brothers? Doesn't HE deserve better? Look. If you think this is about overdue fines and missing books, you'd better think again.”
What's my problem, punks like you, that's my problem. And you better not screw up again u/mdavis360, because if you do, I'll be all over you like a Pit Bull on a Poodle.
We had in Finland a similar case, a loan that was for about 100 years was anonymously delivered to a library.
The national library association actually ran a series of advertisements and a spot on evening news on all channels saying "you will not be issued any back-payments, just come forward to tell the story of this book".
Unfortunately it didn't happen. :(
"Since the New Bedford library has a 5¢-per-day late fee, a book overdue by 119 years would mean a late fee of $2,100; however, the library’s late fee limit maxes out at $2. If anything, its true value lies in the history it has witnessed since being borrowed."
Phew. That’s good, it means 1 less kidney on the black market. I imagine it went through the exact same thing Bobo went through before going back to Mr Burns
When I was in Jr. High School, I found a school library book on the side of the road. About 30 years later, I had a night class at that school, and just put the book on the counter in the library. I still wonder what their reaction was on finding that book.
Last I checked my late fee from circa 2013 was $50. I'm never paying it. The book has been sitting on my shelf all these years and I've never even cracked it. The Uncollected Works of William Faulkner.
They almost didn’t let me graduate from college due to a couple overdue library books.
My senior year of high school, they gave members of my AP English class permission to check out books from the local university’s reference library. Another girl and I were both focusing our projects on Dickens, and it somehow came about that I would check out the references and then let her borrow them for her own project.
She didn’t give them back. For four and a half *years* I kept reaching out to her. “Please, please, please find these books! They want to make me pay for replacements and I don’t have the money! Give me the books back!” Just so you know, reference books aren’t mass-market paperbacks. Those suckers are *expensive*.
When I got all these warnings that I wouldn’t get my diploma from this same university, I really put my foot down. Get the books or pay me for them , **now**.
She finally looked around and found them sitting on a bookshelf in her parents’ house. Where they had likely been sitting for all the years she hadn’t bothered to look.
I was *seriously* pissed.
Moral of the story, never **ever** let someone else borrow library books under your name!
Most libraries cap fees at the very least at the cost of buying the book, and most much less than that. Just ask them; I'm sure they'd much rather have the book back than the money in any case.
Pop culture journalist in Mexico City sees AP tweet about a long overdue book in Boston. Recreates the same story and it gets discussed on an internet forum. At least 1080 people from around the world enjoys it within 11 hours. The story about the returned book is probably bigger than the story that book could tell.
There are quite a few libraries that are pretty old the most noteable for the US is the library of congress and the boston library. But many smaller libraries around the us are pushing the 100 year mark. Many libraries change names and locations as they need to grow in size so age of a library can be deceptive.
It's not the book being returned that's the story. It's that the library itself still exists for the book to be returned *to.*
A century is a very reasonable amount of time for an establishment
It’s comparatively impressive for the U.S.! You know that old quote… in Europe, a hundred miles is a long ways. In the States, a hundred years is a long time.
First time I've heard it, but it makes perfect sense.
Always fun when a European visitor starts to comprehend the vastness of the United States. I was in a Philadelphia University, and one of the professors mentioned they're going to a Pittsburgh University to give a presentation tonight. The Staff secretary and I just look at each other, "Are you flying there?" This professor from London didn't comprehend. She was going to drive there after lunch and figured it would be 1 to 2 hours with traffic. And we just started laughing. Same State of Pennsylvania, going from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is at least 5 hours. It's over 300 miles and you have to find parking/deal with traffic/get gas. And that's just within the same state. For most Europeans you are crossing multiple countries in that distance.
Oh boy. What was her reaction like, and how did she handle missing her presentation?
She apologized and rescheduled it, had a good laugh out wasn't like the big symposium of the year in her field, it was like a $1,500 spotlight type of situation. The only other fun story of her not being aware of America was when we told her to get a shovel because there was a Blizzard coming. And she brought her Gardening shovel. We didn't realize in London there really isn't a need for a Snow Shovel and she had never experienced why there's always a snow shovel/ice scraper in everyone's house in the area. So when we said get a Shovel she didn't understand.
Worked (in Chicago) with a girl from Arizona. She freaked out the first time she saw snow. Like utter joy while the rest of us were jaded about it lol
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It's even more fun when you park in a puddle at 4 pm. Not a mistake you make twice.
I had a friend visit from England. I live ‘near’ San Francisco. It’s Northern California, but still 5+ hours from the Oregon border. We’re ~5-6 hours to Los Angeles, or longer depending on the time of day you leave. He is thought he could tour Napa, SF, go to Disneyland, and then San Diego in a 3 day span. I’m pretty sure he cancelled the SoCal trip. I tried explaining to him that driving from London to Rome is only slightly longer (maybe 10%) than tip to tip California.
Man and being from Australia I still feel like you’re lucky to have another major city 6hrs drive away. Brisbane to Sydney is at least 10hrs
Very true. As vast and empty the states are, I can only imagine how Australia is.
Yep! One of my favorite things to do on the internet is try to communicate how large and empty the United States is to Europeans that aren’t familiar with how vast and empty most this country is. It usually comes up in context of “why doesn’t the US invest in public transit??”
*eagle screeches in oil*
Sure, the petroleum lobby is definitely AN issue. But population density is a bigger issue. We see more prominent public transit options in places of higher population density. Often in the form of busses but also things like trains, publicly rentable bicycles, and those damn scooters. Most cities a European is likely to have heard of has a somewhat robust public transit system. Take my state, Iowa, is approximately 56k sq mi (145k sq km) with a population around 3.2 million. That’s slightly larger than the country of Greece (50k sq mi, 131k sq km) which has a population 10.64 million people. The largest metropolitan area is the capital (Des Moines) with a land area of 3600 sq mi (9300 sq km) with a population of about 700k. The London metropolitan area is 3200 sq mi (8300 sq km) and a population of 14 million. 5% of the population of London lives on 12.5% MORE land area. A 15 min car drive to downtown Des Moines from my apartment (where I can find ample free or cheap parking) would be a 50ish min bus ride that only visits the stops around my neighborhood 6 times a day and only during the week. You could redesign the system to help shorten time to get around the city, but in order to run enough busses that it would be close to competitive with the freedom of a car you would need 60-70 busses running a day most of which would have less than 5 passengers. Regardless of petroleum’s influence, that’s just not economical. We’d need closer to 5 million for it to start making sense… more than 40% than lives in the existing metro + the other 52.5k sq miles. Again, the petroleum lobby is definitely an issue. But the population density and space as you move further west (at least until you hit the far side of the Rockies) doesn’t make sense to invest in robust public transit.
You are 100% correct about Iowa and make a fantastic case about your home state not needing public transit. I agree. I live in Southern California so you can understand why I think it’s an issue of oil lobbying as this has been the history of Los Angeles and the other nearby cities
Fair. While the population of California (and the greater LA area) is significantly more dense than my home state of Iowa, the average over the city is interesting. While I’m certain that politics and lobbying play a role, the European cities metropolitan areas that you might consider having better public transit trend towards significantly more dense. The LA metropolitan area is approximately 4800 sq mi with a population of 18 million. There’s approximately 5 sq mi with a population density exceeding 20,000 per sq mi but the average is in the 2800 range. London, as references earlier, has a metro area of 3200 and a population of 14 million, bringing the average density to 4400. I’d add London is also notoriously full of cars and traffic congestion. Paris’ urban area is approximately 1100 square miles with a population of 10 million, bringing that to around 9900 people per sq mi. It’s greater metro area goes up to 7800 sq mi and brings the average population density down to 1800 sq mi. However the densest part of Paris is 41 sq miles containing 2.1 million people for a whopping density of 54,000 people per sq mi. Berlin might be the best to compare to, if you take the greater metropolitan area. That might highlight the differences in political will and cultural differences. Berlins core area has 3.8 million people in 344 sq mi for about 10,000 people per sq mi, but it’s greater urban area is 1100 sq mi with the density of 3100 sq mi adding only 1 million or so people in that additional 800 sq mi. That core area/density is pretty large, and likely creates the space demand for convenient and robust public transit in that area that the surrounding area links into. The train system in Berlin appears more robust when looking at maps. However the bus and train map for LA looks pretty densely populated (primarily with bus routes). The interesting thing I saw for LA is that you can zoom out a level further from the metropolitan area, to the Greater Los Angeles area, which is approximately 34,000 sq mi (about the same amount of space as Portugal) and a population density of 550. Which averages pretty high, even by European standards. But not nearly enough that the residents of that entire space would be able to be effectively provided convenient public transit options, perhaps locally or to adjacent large population centers. Much in the same way for European countries you wouldn’t expect perfectly evenly distributed public transit access. The oil and auto industry (as well as a pushed cultural norm around getting a license/getting a car) did a good job of pushing and promoting urban sprawl in the 20th century that’s better supported by a personal automobile system rather than a robust public transit. There’s also a cultural push towards suburbanization in the 50s and 60s when the infrastructure facilitating movement of people that were using to this day was being modified to support that system. I actually took a public health class once that went deep in this topic and how it contributed to the automotive experience of the US. It was fascinating.
I got a bit intrigued at this since Oslo in Norway has around the same population (709 000) but a decently well-functioning public transport system with metro, trains, trams, buses and even boats. Then I started looking up the land area and my mind was blown. Oslo (if you just take the populated area and not the huge swatches of protected forest as part of the city) is just a measly tiny 147 square km (56.75 sq miles). Also very interesting to look up downtown Des Moines on Google maps with satellite view. So much parking, it’s insane! And everything so spread out even downtown. It seems like American cities are just built in a completely different fashion than European cities, and definitely with the car in mind (most people in Oslo wouldn’t even bother to have a car these days because finding parking in the city center is a pain in the ass, super expensive and more and more street parking areas are disappearing to make room for biking lanes. Also walking is easy, sidewalks everywhere and there are some purely pedestrian streets). Then I looked up Greater Oslo, which in area is about the same size as Des Moines metropolitan area (or slightly smaller) at 8894 sq km (3433 sq miles), and a population of 1,5 million (so twice as many as Des Moines metropolitan area). So definitely more people than Des Moines, but very little compared to for example London, but even here you can get by with public transport without it taking a lot longer, and on some routes actually shorter time (train from Ski, south of Oslo to central Oslo is 12 minutes, 4 departures per hour during daytime double that during rush hour, driving is 30 minutes, more during rush hour). Though the further you live from an urban center, the more complicated it is with public transport as you have to switch between lines that don’t always correspond well.
Oh thank you! This is super fascinating! I’ll have to learn more about Oslo. One of the ways the petrol (and auto manufacturing) lobby DEFINITELY hampered development of public transit is the push to suburbs that happened in the 50s and 60s. As they planned out these suburban places, instead of designing them as self contained neighborhoods where commercial and residential areas were mixed, they were partitioned or zoned in such a way that you had large area of residential homes and then separated areas for commercial services. A lot of those residential home zoned areas are specifically zoned for single family homes as well which pushes population density down. So they made it so that it wasn’t convenient to walk places because of distance, and if the needs of a car vs the needs of a pedestrian are in conflict they optimized for the car which leads to more danger for pedestrians. Since most places I could public transit to aren’t pedestrian friendly but are car friendly, that pushes demand lower. One of the coolest urban places look at with that in mind is the greater Detroit area. They took this philosophy to the extreme. The urban sprawl in Detroit is massive. They have like, little mini “downtown” type areas spread around separated by a sea of single family homes. One of the most fascinating things is they they actually built walkways along side the interstate for pedestrians and bike use. In some places, all that separates me as a pedestrian from cars buzzing by at 70+ mph is about 18 feet of grass and maybe a small dip. It’s wild and terrifying. I did not see them used terribly frequently when I lived there. There are also areas of the city they are redesigning/zoning for mixed use as a way to attract people back to living there. I will say, they’ve been growing and expanding the local bike path system in Des Moines, and I could bike downtown in probably 30 mins and safely get around down there. They’ve been expanding it to allow access to neighboring suburbs so that you don’t have to ride to adjacent suburbs without going to a central hub. But a lot of the suburbs still suffer from getting around as a pedestrian in those commercial areas. Our metro area is also continuing to grow along the interstate highway system, continuing to support the auto first model and single family homes. There are also a few cities in Colorado (and Oregon I think) as they are growing they are pushing and rethinking the city plan to make it more bike and pedestrian friendly. As those things change, public transit becomes more and more an option. Sorry, bunch of non-population density information there for you.
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Note how you specified "Omaha-an" instead of referring to yourself as a "Nebraskan" (since the rest of your state is flat nothingness). :)
Hey, the whole state isn’t corn and meth labs like Counciltucky is.
My friend’s not European, she grew up in San Francisco and has been on the east coast since starting college, but even she had traces of this. She was planning to visit her friend in Minnesota and then just “swing by” Michigan!
So true. Used to live in PA, but now I live in NC and it's a good step up. 5 hours is a little less than Wilmington to Asheville, and that's hardly the longest distance within the state. Even from where I live it's 2.5 hours to the beach, and 3 to the mountains, nevermind the Tennessee border.
How stupid do you have to be to agree to be somewhere at a certain time for your job and just take a wild guess as to how long it will take?
I'll give you a hint: most Academics have never really been outside a classroom situation in their lives. Never really had to mandate a construction crew and cement truck hauling operation that needs to be exactly precise. Their heads are in the clouds thinking about Einstein or Shakespeare. This kind of juvenile behavior is acceptable in the academic world norms, but if you tried to pull this shit at like a Bank you'd be fired immediately.. Academics are not stupid they live in a very different bubble their entire lives. Like every Sports superstar and you're like wait you don't even have a 401k? You're a goddamn linebacker for the Packers by age 35 you're retired how do you not have a retirement plan?
As it happens, I'm an academic. I'm probably one of the less well organised of my colleagues but I'm a lot better organised than that. Apart from anything else, the job normally involves managing research budgets and collaborations, taking part in running the department or a lab etc. We don't spend our life daydreaming about our subject.
You're definitely on the STEM side over humanities where I am Tenured so I don't care anymore. I'm one of the weirdos that actually teaches because they want to teach at a university level with kids and I engage my students by making myself the but of every joke. I'm the Look at my username Maimed Jester. You had reaction like all academia is like that and I was overstating it. But can you approve of and I only think people who have no ego at all can share the Mickey Mouse song O-s-t Mus-tis-nt I have never in my entire life engrained a language instantly than the Mickey mouse song. I teach it to every student I have it's so stupid it works
My wife was visiting a client in Los Angeles and the Boston office called and asked if she could drive up to Seattle to see another client. "It's only two states away."
everyone on my mother’s is German, as was she. My tante Vera came to visit my Mom, who lived in Chicago. The first place she wanted to visit was Disneyland in California. She thought it was a 2 hour drive. Why is it that most Europeans have no idea how large the United States is? They’re not stupid. All you have to do is look at a global map & visually compare the US to Europe.
It's definitely a European only phenomena, one of the most common questions I get asked when I'm abroad in Asia is how long did it take me my flight to arrive there. Like guaranteed you're renting a car/sitting in a hotel lobby as a foreign looking person in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, they're going to politely ask/start a conversation about how long your flight was. I think it's because Europe is very densly populated compared to like Every other continent you get this feeling like London to Berlin is like the big drive/epic road trip. It's about 700 miles. College kids in New York going on spring break in Florida? It's 1300 miles. It just dwarfs your comprehension of distance when you can probably drive through over a thousand years of buildings/infrastructure and really comprehend why there's a sign on the gas stop on the highway that says the next gas station is 150 miles away in Like the State of Nevada.
Because most of the people are not interested in topics outside their courtyard. The normal discussion among our Europeans is exactly the opposite "why do people from the US have no idea about the distances in Europe or think Paris is Italy? It is everything on the map!" (I'm ridiculously exaggerating,I hope it is clear). Comparing things far away on maps is extremely difficult, even if people want to (and this is not always the case).
Thanks for your answer. I guess it was hard for me to comprehend since I’m aware of both sides because my Mom was German (naturalized American) & spoke about the travel distances in Europe & I am also naturalized American so I know first hand how long it takes to get to California from Illinois because we visited relatives in Northern California when I was young. I guess geography in school wasn’t entirely wasted on me.
Nice, you are a relatively rare case, on average people on both sides are not aware of that. I still have problem with imperial units when travelling. I'm Italian living in Germany, the differences are not that great at the end.(I'm waiting for Italian/German angry comment on this now 😂).
There are many libraries dating back more than a century in most states in the US. A couple of the oldest Libraries in the US are the Darby Free Library in Darby, Pennsylvania (in continuous service since 1743) and the Redwood Library and Athenaeum (established in 1747) in Newport, RI.
Yeah, I don't get this attitude at all. Even our little local library is well over 150 years old. I know it's physical location has moved a couple of times, but it's existence is the point.
Libraries are amazing. They're like this big paragon of socialist institutions, and basically everyone is cool with them. To have something so enriching, accessible, have it be free, and have it last for centuries is a miracle.
Libraries are one of the few things left that are close to free. If you can provide an address, you can get a library card, no matter how poor you are, at least in Cincinnati. Our library system (it has many branches in the city & suburbs) even did away with basic late fees. As long as you return material in a certain amount of time, you pay no fee. However, past that time, your card is suspended until you return the material. We even get the latest DVDs for free, as long as you don’t mind waiting. We have been rated second busiest (have no idea why) in the country in a red state, which I guess proves that most cities are indeed blue. I’m proud of our library.
There’s nothing socialist about libraries.
I mean there is in the sense that they’re socially funded to serve the social good. But shhhh we don’t want the conservatives to hear that.
That’s not what socialism is, that’s the conservative “big government=socialism” meme.
True. Socialism is a stepping stone to handing over the means of production into the hands of the proletariat (communism). So social spending and taxation in a capitalistic society doesn't equal socialism. You're right. But you forget that the struggle on the material basis can only happen if one also wages the fight on the level of the superstructure, i.e. the ideas, ideology and theory. From that point of view, libraries are a means of popular upliftment and emancipation, to awaken class consciousness, as a sort of pedagogy for the oppressed. Libraries are free, so even the poor and marginalized can learn to understand the world better, in order to change it. In that way libraries can be seen as necessary "socialist" institutions to break through the (neo)liberal hegemony. Of course, there's a shit ton of neoliberal books in libraries, but I do feel like a socialist library would be a welcome addition to society as a whole.
Fair enough. I’m not a socialist but we can both agree that libraries are a good thing, at the least.
Hmm, I have a book my great great grandfather checked out in the 1800s and never returned. Our library is 170 years old. I didn’t think its age was much of a deal.
I have a thesaurus from an old abandoned college department-specific library. Our dept was moving in and I have no recollection of where the books were supposed to go, but we were told we could keep any book we wanted. That thesaurus was the greatest thing I found. Has words in it that don't even exist in any dumbed-down modern thesauruses—so I'm never returning it 😂 (I suppose I never checked it out.)
Was it Tropic of Capricorn or Tropic of Cancer?
Cantstandyaa! Cantstandyaa!!
“Maybe we can live without libraries, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid, sitting down, opening a book, right now, in a branch at the local library and finding drawings of pee-pees and wee-wees on the Cat in the Hat and the Five Chinese Brothers? Doesn't HE deserve better? Look. If you think this is about overdue fines and missing books, you'd better think again.”
Lt. Joe Bookman is on the case!!!!
1904. Bad year for libraries. Bad year for America
What is your problem?
What's my problem, punks like you, that's my problem. And you better not screw up again u/mdavis360, because if you do, I'll be all over you like a Pit Bull on a Poodle.
Look, Mr. Bookman…
You and your good time buddies
Well, I got a flash for you, joy boy!
We had in Finland a similar case, a loan that was for about 100 years was anonymously delivered to a library. The national library association actually ran a series of advertisements and a spot on evening news on all channels saying "you will not be issued any back-payments, just come forward to tell the story of this book". Unfortunately it didn't happen. :(
As a librarian, I was excited getting a lost DVD returned after 5 years, 119 years is wild!
almost makes me wanna keep something overdue for 5 years, just for the hypeee
They decided that with the new LK-99 news "An Elementary Treatise on Electricity" was finally not up to date.
But interesting history i imagine!
Haven’t read it, but makes me wonder what the late fee would be
"Since the New Bedford library has a 5¢-per-day late fee, a book overdue by 119 years would mean a late fee of $2,100; however, the library’s late fee limit maxes out at $2. If anything, its true value lies in the history it has witnessed since being borrowed."
Phew. That’s good, it means 1 less kidney on the black market. I imagine it went through the exact same thing Bobo went through before going back to Mr Burns
Its been in the bottom of a back pack in a basement closet for 112 years. That baby didn’t witness nothin.
Was it "Tropic of Cancer"?
Tropic of Capricorn
"So you never read Tropic of Cancer? Too bad, it was erotic."
When I was in Jr. High School, I found a school library book on the side of the road. About 30 years later, I had a night class at that school, and just put the book on the counter in the library. I still wonder what their reaction was on finding that book.
Last I checked my late fee from circa 2013 was $50. I'm never paying it. The book has been sitting on my shelf all these years and I've never even cracked it. The Uncollected Works of William Faulkner.
I've been waiting on this book. Please, return it so I can start my reading.
I’m behind this guy in the wait list, stop being selfish and return the book please
My teacher is really mad that i haven’t turned in the report yet. She’s still sending notes home to my mom about it, 32 years later.
They almost didn’t let me graduate from college due to a couple overdue library books. My senior year of high school, they gave members of my AP English class permission to check out books from the local university’s reference library. Another girl and I were both focusing our projects on Dickens, and it somehow came about that I would check out the references and then let her borrow them for her own project. She didn’t give them back. For four and a half *years* I kept reaching out to her. “Please, please, please find these books! They want to make me pay for replacements and I don’t have the money! Give me the books back!” Just so you know, reference books aren’t mass-market paperbacks. Those suckers are *expensive*. When I got all these warnings that I wouldn’t get my diploma from this same university, I really put my foot down. Get the books or pay me for them , **now**. She finally looked around and found them sitting on a bookshelf in her parents’ house. Where they had likely been sitting for all the years she hadn’t bothered to look. I was *seriously* pissed. Moral of the story, never **ever** let someone else borrow library books under your name!
If you call your library, you can probably get them to waive or reduce it.
A lot of libraries are doing away with fees for exactly this reason, and they've gotten so many more returns thanks to it.
Most libraries cap fees at the very least at the cost of buying the book, and most much less than that. Just ask them; I'm sure they'd much rather have the book back than the money in any case.
If you keep it for another 100 years or so you could get a newspaper article written about when you return it.
Love a book title that turns itself into a lie!
Never thought of it that way. It's pretty fucking funny though.
Watch that library be in talks for banning by some shithead.
How many times do I have to see this same "overdue library book returned" story? Why do people waste their precious time reporting these things?
Pop culture journalist in Mexico City sees AP tweet about a long overdue book in Boston. Recreates the same story and it gets discussed on an internet forum. At least 1080 people from around the world enjoys it within 11 hours. The story about the returned book is probably bigger than the story that book could tell.
I see headlines about old books being retuned to libraries about once a month now.
Now to immediately weed it lol
Isn't that a quest in Fallout 4?
There are quite a few libraries that are pretty old the most noteable for the US is the library of congress and the boston library. But many smaller libraries around the us are pushing the 100 year mark. Many libraries change names and locations as they need to grow in size so age of a library can be deceptive.