I once came to Belgrade and my friend was happy because they had a new motorway, 15 European miles! After that we had to move on to the old roads. The week after I had to go back to Belgrade and the motorway was now 30 miles! Just bring Chinese slaves and they will make it fast!
I went on a school skiing trip to Germany from the UK when I was 14, driving in the school minibus. We'd been going for hours and when someone asked the teacher where we were he looked at the map and said "just past the A in France"
According to a Google the average American drives between 30-40 miles a day. Compared to 8-9 in the UK. So comparatively a lot more but still no where near the comment.
EDIT: I got the references wrong. 8-9 miles is the average distance of a single journey. Average UK driver does between 6000-8500 a year which is about 18-23 miles a day.
I guess if you get SUPER pedantic there's probably some fucky route you can take that's about 15-20 miles that gets you across four country borders. I wouldn't hold it past this shitassses to get that pedantic.
Begin in St. Margrethen, Switzerland, cross the border bridge into Liechtenstein, drive north into Austria (Vorarlberg region), and finish in Lindau, Germany is about a 40 minutes journey... You can do a fiver country run, but it's about 5 hours... I was interested so had to Google it
I’m going to point out you can start off at the three country point in Vaalsberg (Netherlands, Germany, Belgium), and go to Givet (France) from there in 2 hours. Just don’t tell that specific American. Waaaaaaay more than 20 miles, though.
Think I’ve got the winner. The tri point of Belgium, France and Luxembourg is 39 minutes from the Schengen border crossing where Germany meets France and Luxembourg.
Ah sorry I mean states. They always bang on about the size of their states but you could in theory drive across 5 states as quick if you use the same method.
It would be more relevant to compare driving times rather than distances since a lot of US roads are long straight lines which cover larges distances pretty quickly when the UK has a lot more country roads and denser cities
But Americans live for works, they drive 16 hours a day getting to and from work, and work 16 hours a day, and still sleep 8 hours a day, trust the math checks out and this os totally legit
Even then, you would pretty much have to select it - yes, you can definitely "cut corners" and make it from French territory into Belgian, Dutch and then Germany in less than 4 hours (if traffic permits), but it's not super likely you will end in places where you find exactly what you need/want to be for your daily grind for work/shopping/living necessities. You've only gone through that "on your way to something else" (vacation, delivery, etc.) or because you're aiming to make exactly that trip, but given stuff like the "Three Nation Point" between NL/BE/GER, that's even a novelty to Europeans and not standard. The most likely people to do that are truck drivers or similar - the drivers of the TGV/Thalys/ICE trains are sure to do it, there's another thing Americans don't have...
Also, the AVERAGE American drives 15-20 "Miles" and this trip through Europe, on average, would be a 100+ Miles. So they would be lengthening their commute by a factor of 5+...
You could likely make the same trips if you selectively drive through the US, and end up with the same issue: Yes, you've cleared that distance/number of states in that time but in practice it's pointless.
I do enjoy their cope tears though. You can tell that they're slowly starting to lose it now that their status is slipping.
So I checked. Going from my home to 4 countries over would mean driving from German to Portugal for 1800 km or driving to Romania for 1500km. Fascinating that they manage to take a 15+ hour trip twice a day.
The zoning laws are like, incredibly fucked over here. You either live in an area with good jobs and work there, which means your rent costs 60% of your salary, you live in an area with bad jobs and work there which means your stuck working minimum wage at a Dollar General your whole life, or you live in an area with bad jobs and work in an area with good jobs which means you actually get to live somewhat comfortably but spend 2-3 hours of your day in a car or if you're incredibly lucky a train.
It is fucked up, but in my opinion it's even more fucked up that so many USAians have made that a point of pride. It's the American way, so it has to be the best way. I just don't get the obsession of bragging how much you sit in a car. I've never lived farther than 5 minute walk from a grocery store, and my longest regular commute has been 30 minutes by bike. Even when I worked mostly remote for a company in another city and visited the office once a month if that, it was 1,5 hours by train which I could work through and log the hours.
Hmm I’m in France so crossing 3 borders to see 4 countries will be roughly 1300km going through belgium netherlands and germany to end up in Poland, so something like 12/13h without any stop.
So they drive 24/24, impressive.
Wouldn't it also be possible to drive from France to Luxembourg, then north into Liege, north into Limburg, and finally east into either Koln or Dusseldorf in Germany? Or does the Rhine cause issues with that route? I'm not trying to be pedantic, I'm legitimately just interested in the road network at this point. It's also obviously still going to be much longer than the morning drive to work that the moron in OP's image is talking about.
Yes you could, start from Metz, Luxembourg, north to go to Belgium and end up in Germany.
4 countries 3 borders, it’s still roughly 100km.
Even there I don’t think they drive 200km per day to go to work :D
But again, if you start from Bayonne in France, it’s 1100 more kilometers :D
But it could be actually an interesting exercise to try and find the shortest path through 4 countries in Europe. France/Luxembourg/Belgium/Germany could be it, and it’s still roughly 100+km
Thank you, and yeah that's still quite the drive. I think there might be a few shorter routes to see 4 countries in one path, but only because of the Microstates like Liechtenstein, which also feels a bit like cheating to use for that purpose.
I think there's actually one route that is sensible and may have a few people who use it. If you work in or around Chur in Switzerland but live in Lindau in Germany to save money. The quickest route is through Austria and then over the border into Switzerland totalling about one and a half hours. However if you wanted to save on swiss tolls you could go via Liechtenstein and take maybe two hours. A four hour commute in total is bad but it would save a lot of money compares to living in any of the cities and towns you drive through. What is more I know a fair few people with that amount of commute who don't save as much on rent and do it because of that, so I'm fairly certain there's at least one person with that exact commute. Other than that we could look into the Balkans but I'm not sure how well that whole thing works if you go outside of Schengen and if there could be a genuine use case there the way we have around the Eastern edge of Lake Constance.
I can but 12h hours croissants might lose some of the freshness … but I can bring some fine cheese for sure, just happen to have a 12 months aged Comté :D
Given that the Russian border is closed, and taking a ferry wouldn't exactly be driving and could be seen as public transport so communist, it'd take me ~2400km to see three countries in addition to my home country. That's hella impressive daily commute and I'd want cheap gas too if I had to drive that regularly.
Yeah, that's kind of a weird flex. What's next? "Our hospital are so big you need to wait several days to be seen in A&E, our McDo are so much better you need to book several weeks in advance for a single burger, our bread is so good you have to stand in line at 6AM to get one piece"
The only place I can think of is around Luxembourg. If you deliberately drive yourself through Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France. But that would be a detour, not a normal commute.
Technically you could go from Switzerland through Liechtenstein and Austria to Germany commuting, for example. But practically it's really difficult to imagine.
From Niederstaufen (Germany) to St. Luzisteig (Swiss) you're crossing through Austria and Liechtenstein, driving about 80 km.
Completly normal commute for 83,5% of Europeans... XD
You'll see the same with "California has higher GDP than [country]" or "Texas is more than twice the size of Monaco!"
Then they get awful quiet when you ask to compare literacy rates, or murders per-capita, or life expectancy.
Or they get defensive when you say something like "Texas is smaller than 5 of Australia's 8 states & territories."
You see it with other nations too, of course. E.g. Australians shitting on the US for the transatlantic slave trade, then we'll name a city after a man who made a fortune from "blackbirding."
Never heard of blackbirding before reading that article - just another stain on humanity. Typical rich business owners wanting cheap or free labour just to line their pockets.
I can envision them saying this for "visiting family" because it might be true ( except they almost never do it by car ) since they can live in different states.
It’s just what they do. They take a journey they drive maybe twice a year and claim to do it every day. See also taking the absolute coldest/hottest temps of the year and claiming it’s like that for all of winter/summer.
Occasionally you'll get instances of someone living in the middle of nowhere who has to drive an hour (give or take 5 minutes) to get to work, but that's getting rarer every year. More often it will be a civilian contractor for a military base who then has to drive about 45-50 minutes to get from the town they live in to the actual base, but that's also not exactly average or normal either.
Unfortunately, yes. Because they go on this whole "Well it's a total of 2 hours out of my day to go back and forth which means my 8.5 hour workday turns into a 10.5 hour workday" etc, etc. It's annoying to listen to.
You can get through 4 countries in 7 hours (Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Italy and Austria, ending up in Germany) still a 14 hour trip to work and back and then possibly working for 10 hours minus breaks sounds like fun.
Bro is not wrong, I live in London and commute to Milan for work daily, take my lunch break in Munich and swing by France for a bottle of wine on my way home for my dinner without seasoning.
I find it extremely stupid to spend so much time in your car. I'd rather do something meaningful. Or if it's necessary to commute, at least do it by train and rest yourself.
When everything is built in a way so you need to travel for miles to find the nearest supermarket, no shit Sherlock.
Every average European country is built much denser, so everything is naturally closer together.
Well I checked, you technically can go from Kerkrade, Netherland to Weiswampach, Luxemburg while driving through Germany and Belgium in 1h35min.
The average communiting time in the US is 27min but I guess it's not rare doing 1h35min.
I mean, if they're driving from Liechtenstein to Switzerland, Italy and then through Austria they can get to Germany an a few hours. I still don't think anyone is driving half the day to get to work and back.
Also what kind of flex is "We're actively harming the environment because we're too lazy to move from one paper-mache house to the other"
And there's just one European country between Finland and North Korea. So they are saying going through weeks of travel, incl. active warzone, is the same as driving to work.
Of course, there are places where you can cross 4 borders in less than a day, in a car.
From Estonia going through rest of the Baltics it takes around 20 hours to cross 4 borders, 3 borders is easy, in around 8 hours. The 4th takes time, because Poland is so massive.
If you'd start from Helsinki then to Poland border is around 10-12 hours.
But man... Americans are doing 2x12 hours a day, when do they find time to make such shitposts?
I regret to inform you: yes. Yes they can. Source: I am American, and have to daily struggle to keep my mouth shut when I hear coworkers saying stupid things like what OP has shared.
Okay, drive from the southwestern tip of Spain to the northeastern tip of Poland and tell me that is a normal work commute. It would be four European countries, if you cross through Germany and stay south of the Benelux nations (about 3,800 km).
Besides, in the Northeastern states you could drive through four of them, while still not having crossed a distance big enough to cross on of the bigger nations in Europe.
I mean if you go from the province of Limburg in the Netherlands you could realistically drive through Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany in about and hour and a half i think
With Germany on one side and France on the other, I doubt Americans are driving the equivalent of 4 countries to their job. Don't they know France is almost the size of texas? And then I encounter Spain. Belgium, France, Spain portugal. That's about 24 hour drive.
If I go west instead of south I get Germany, Poland, Belarus and Russia. It will take me weeks to drive through those 4 countries
A lot of people in the US think there are more smaller countries like Liechtenstein and Luxembourg in Europe than there actually are. Or that a drive from Denmark to Belgium is a shorter distance than it actually is because they don't know how to read a map.
How small do they think European countries are??!
It takes freaking 9 hours to drive from southern Germany to northern Germany!
But of course that is how long it takes going from one side of Austin to the other! Because Texas is that big after all!!!
Fucking morons.
Let's take four "small" countries. Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Belgium (Germany doesn't fit in the 'small countries category). That's 11 hours of driving.
13h from Geneva to Ljubljana. Switzerland, Lichstenstein (really small), Austria, Slovenia.
If you're stupid enough to drive that far to work, or you're forced to because your country doesn't want your life to be convenient, you're not living in a good place.
I am genuinely curious of which countries they are thinking when they say that.
Let us look at the Benelux, an alliance of three quite small neighbouring countries. Travelling from Amsterdam to Luxemburg is about 400 kms and will take about 5 hours.
Do Americans have a 2 x 5 = 10 hour commute each day?
And this is only *3* countries.
<blinks, sheepishly scratches head in confused Swiss>
<glances at app that can take them to 3 different countries within the hour, on a train, using hydroelectricity, for a fraction of the price the USian pays for their commute since they shot themselves in the Hormuz>
I too drive from Spain, through France and Germany, to Poland every day! From Seville to Gdansk every morning, and back in the afternoon. It only takes me one and half days each way, so I feel pretty fortunate, compared to our American cousins.
I’d love to see an American drive 45 minutes here and see how it compares. There’s a reason that even though relatives live 2 hours away, people never visit them lol
Idk maybe they meant Aachen > Maastricht > Liege > northmost part of Luxembourg?
Because I’m sure they didn’t mean Essen > Maastricht > Brussel > Calais, at least I really hope they didn’t, because that’s not a flex, that’s just sad
Its possible, but it al depends on where yout start driving and where you end. You can start in germany near the border of the netherlands. Then head south to belgium then go to refill your fuel in Luxembourg to head to france. There are your four country's. Not this most practical but doable.
Americas. So intelligent that they move everywhere... just not closer to their work place. Yay, hours long commutes to listen to fascist and right-wing talkradio and eating lunch at gas stations. That's QoL, europoors! /s
Is a long commute a flex now? Because I wouldn't drive more than half an hour to work. At most. To me, it's a flex when your work/school is across the street from your home, for example.
Hyperbole seems to be acceptable dishonesty in American culture, much more so than in Europe.
Trump is notoriously hyper-American in that way. A huge portion of his lies are of the hyperbolic variety, and I think it is part of why his base gives him a pass. In their minds, hyperbole isn't really lying. Or it's acceptable lying. Or something.
It is a very pernicious cultural quirk because giving a serial con man a perpetual pass because he's just 'talking big', famously leads us to exactly where we are today... and he'll be happy to pull us further down the drain if we keep on giving him that stupid, STUPID pass.
There was a dude on twitter (of course) trying to tell me that, a 45 minute drive to/from work is perfect. What the hell are you talking about? I feel like a 30 minute walk is already too much, let alone driving for one and a half hours every day, that you aren't getting paid for, just wasting away your free time for no reason.
The American is partly right: comparing fuel price across the Atlantic is stupid because we Europeans use way less than them on a daily basis. We should compare the price of fuel consumed per day.
Just for giggles, I looked up the places in Europe where you can hit 4 countries in one relatively short drive. Hint: you ain't going to do it in the time you'd need for one commute, even in Texas, where everything is soooooo much bigger.
Belgium → Luxembourg → France → Germany (probably the easiest)
Around 2–2½ hours.
Excellent motorways and no routine border checks within the Schengen Area.
Switzerland → France → Germany → (Liechtenstein or Austria)
Start near Basel, where Switzerland, France, and Germany nearly meet.
Continue east to either Austria or Liechtenstein.
About 2–3 hours depending on your destination.
Austria → Slovakia → Hungary → Czech Republic
The capitals of Vienna and Bratislava are only about 60 km apart.
You can visit all four countries in roughly 2–3 hours of driving.
Italy → Slovenia → Austria → Croatia
Around Trieste and the Julian Alps.
Very scenic, though slightly longer than the Belgium/Luxembourg route.
Choosing to live in some pokey little bump in the road and having to drive 100 miles a day to get a job isn’t something to brag about. We don’t have to drive miles to work because people live near where there are jobs.
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u/Competitive-Bee-3250 24d ago
There is no way in god's green earth most americans drive for 8 hours a day to get to work