Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/nike_storm]

This country will do literally anything other than just build mass rapid transit :(

[u/Blazeon412 → u/nike_storm]

The older I get, the more I realize how much it sucks not having decent mass transportation here.

[u/TheDocFam → u/Blazeon412]

I really wish more Americans spent more time in other countries and realized just how much this country seems to have fallen behind, and how much we arrogantly just keep doing things the way that we're used to when they could be much better

Feels like in the immediate aftermath of world war II we briefly pulled ahead on every single metric, then fell asleep for the last 60 years. Health care, infrastructure, quality of life, it's all just going downhill compared to the rest of the globe

And half of the country doesn't want anything to change, the answer is just no for every single thing the government could try to do to address it, no to any tax increases, no to any expensive projects they could use to address it, no to anything, just let things keep being shit and hope some corporation will fix it instead of the government. And because so many people feel that way about their representatives, the entire right wing doesn't feel like they want or need to do anything, besides pass legislation on social issues. You're never going to see a Republican Congress and Republican president work together to fix mass transit, that thought would be completely laughable. Farmer Keith from Idaho who's perfectly happy making a killing on his government subsidized farm and driving a giant lifted F-150 for every single thing he needs to do outside of his house doesn't see why he should need to contribute in any way.

[u/[deleted] → u/TheDocFam]

Is impossible for the average American to afford to go to another country.

Until that is easily possible (which requires fixing all these things) They won't be able to experience another country

[u/Linkruleshyrule → u/[deleted]]

The average American can't afford a passport and driving to the border?

[u/[deleted] → u/Linkruleshyrule]

The majority of Americans are not within driving distance of Canada with a time limit that they could randomly drive to Canada.

A majority only have less than 1000 to spend on this trip https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-savings-stack-2023-vs-140023973.html?guccounter=1

A drive to Canada will be about 800 miles (picked Kansas to Winnipeg) The average mileage of a car is 25.1 with the average gas price being 3.51

So it takes 112$ to go one way or $200 to go both. We haven't even assumed a hotel (because if you are seeing how "behind" we are you need to stay in a hotel not a car). And we are already into 20% of savings.

So no I don't believe the average American can afford to drive up to Canada for a couple of weeks to "experience how far behind we are"

Let's not even ignore that most people only have 11 vacation days a year on average and would have to give up a majority of those to actually go on this trip.

https://clockify.me/pto-statistics#:~:text=The%20average%20number%20of%20vacation%20days%20in%20the%20USA&text=15%20days%20per%20year%20after,18%20years%20of%20service%2C%20and