[AskEurope] Fellow Europeans, what is the aspect of USA lifestyle that surprises you the most?
[AskEurope] Fellow Europeans, what is the aspect of USA lifestyle that surprises you the most?
First of all, let's try to avoid American-bashing, and stay respectful to everyone.
I'll start: for me it's the tipping culture. Especially nowadays, with the recent post on !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world with the 40% tip, it just seems so weird to me to have to pay extra just so that menu prices can stay low.
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I've never understood why the drinking age is higher than the driver licence age.
And taking away voting rights from felons.
Both baffle me.
Voting is generally handled at the state level, so preventing felons from voting is a state thing. That said, they already did time, why punish them further by disenfranchisement?
I’ve never understood why the drinking age is higher than the driver licence age.
Because driving is a necessity and drinking is not.
And taking away voting rights from felons.
That's an instrument of oppression. Our right-wing party wins by stopping people from voting.
With some infrastructure near your housing and a working public transport, driving isn't a necessity.
How? If you live in a suburb, even with working public transport, there could be dozens of stops between home and work.
why would the number of stops be a problem?
when i went to secondary school there were 13 bus stops (15 minutes) and when i went to university there were 12 train stops (30 minutes). And i wouldn't classify either of those as a long commute
The stops, and the indirect route the bus must take to reach all of those stops, greatly increases travel time, and by “greatly increases” I mean by a factor of 2 to 3.
For example, Google Maps estimates that, to travel from the suburban apartment complex where I live to a business building in the next town, it would take 12 minutes by car or 42 minutes by bus. And yes, there are bus stops close to both the start and end points of this route; that time is actually spent riding a bus, not walking.
Outside of densely-packed cities, public transit is, by its nature, slow. Very, very slow. More public transit doesn't change that. It might decrease how long you spend waiting for a bus to arrive, but the bus still has to make the same stops along the same indirect route, so it's not going to be any faster once you're aboard.
Cars are popular for a reason. It's not just some anti-competitive car-industry conspiracy. Public transit very much exists where I live, and whenever I see a bus on the road, there's almost never more than a few people aboard. Buses are quite clearly viewed as transportation of last resort.
rural areas here have buses with stop-on-demand. the bus continues on when no one is in the stop AND no one on board has pressed the stop button. very convenient.
With some infrastructure near your housing and a working public transport, driving isn't a necessity.