It's cruel to mock the stupid

[pecunium]

Which is why I am not linking to this, but it's an amazing moment of WTF!?!, and I can't keep it to myself (I'm not always the nicest of people).

Today I’m on a flight to San Jose, CA. Well, two flights. Couldn’t find a direct flight.

It was yesterday that I discovered LA and SF were not in the same location… See, I don’t know CA very well and I’m actually headed to Palo Alto. So I mistakenly assumed that LA was pretty much right there, too.

I think the confusion came from last time I was in CA, I flew into SF and out of Oakland, so I had this impression of all the cities being close to each other.

I'm croggled. Not so much that a grown man, and an american citizen, might not know LA and SF are 400 miles apart from each other, but that he would look at a state the size of California, and assume all the metropli are adjacent because two of them were so colocated the last time he was here.

That's the first bit.

The second is that he admits it, with a sense of blasé delivery which implies he thinks this a reasonable mistake to make.

Comments

Re-visioning the question.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Americans make these kinds of mistakes about the UK all the time tho'. One thing you aren't really factoring in here is that proximity does not equal distance.

The original poster was thinking in terms of proximity: he'd had short flights between one and the other.

In the UK, distances can be short, and travel times--thanks to railways, canals, roads that followed nineteenth century trade and political imperatives--can be long. I can travel the *distance* from Oxford to Cambridge in a couple of hours if it is laid along a rail road track. Actually doing the damn journey takes half a day.

London to York is one and half hours by train now. London to Liverpool is stuck at two and a half. They are more or less the same distance, but Liverpool is a terminus no one wants to go to. York is on the way to Edinburgh and is also a tourist destination, so it gets high speed tracks.

What I notice is that people moving regions in the US make the same kinds of mistakes: if they move from a place with high density of travel platforms then they often think in terms of long travel time, short distances. If from areas with few travel options (ie mostly only long roads) then they often assume long distances with relatively short travel times.

Travel time and "a long way" is a cultural thing. I'm one of the few UK people I know who will cheerfully travel two or three hours "for lunch", but that's because I lived in Poughkeepsie and later in Wallingford, and "going into the city for lunch" was standard.

Re: Re-visioning the question.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I discovered that particular disparity when I lived in the UK. A trip that would normally (in the US) take 90 minutes took 3 hours. Of course, it was from Ipswich to Wells-by-the-Sea, and went across the fen country, but still...!

And the train from Ipswich to London (which is only 70 miles) took two hours.

Here in Arkansas, I live 12 miles from my workplace. It normally takes me 20 minutes to get there. I seriously doubt that I could claim that in the Northeast Corridor or any of its cities.

Re: Re-visioning the question.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

When I was seeing someone who was in Orange, and I in Sepulveda (A linear distancce of about 35 miles, and a variable road distance of 45-70), I would look at where I was (because I worked in Hollywood, which was of me, and more west of her) and plan my route based on the time of day.

I could, with fair reliability, get from one to the other, inside of 40 minutes, no matter what time it was.

But I am a naturalised Angeleno, roads are things one knows as Leatherstocking knows the woods.

TK

Re: Re-visioning the question.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I was factoring that in. I've lived in the wilds of the desert. I've lived in the midst of Cleveland, and Chicago. I've lived in Monterey.

San Luis Obisbo is an island. It takes as long to get to SLO, from LA, or SF, as it does to get from LA to SF.

When I travel (and I travel a lot) I look at the map. I was croggled, in a different way, when they flew us from Munich to Nuremberg. It would have been faster on a bus, more comfortable on the train.

I was driven from Edinburgh, to Inverness, but flown from Inverness to London, because of timing issues (I'd been flown to Edinburgh from London). The poster didn't say he'd had short flights from LA to SF, but that he'd had a short surface trip from SF to Oakland, which are each visible to the other.

TK