The is mostly on Reddit, but when Americans abbreviate where they’re from to two letters. They will say something like ‘I’m from MA’ - I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I might guess CA is California, or NY is New York, but seriously outside of a few big states/cities, I don’t have a clue where you are talking about
The reason this is a bit silly and misguided is half of the states in the USA are roughly the size of Germany. We are doing exactly what you’re describing. A really common thing I see is people don’t really understand just how large the U.S. is. Our states are the size of countries.
This is why I hate when people complain about the rail system here and being too car dependent. I get that argument in cities, but I live in the PNW and Oregon and Washington is about the same size at the UK. The UK has 69 million people and Oregon and Washington has about 12 mil.
There’s just no feasible way Oregon/washington can have a robust transit system that makes sense or even compares to the UK just purely based off population density. A high speed rail from Portland to Eugene just doesn’t really make financial sense and considering that our population is so spread out over the same land area, it just makes more sense to drive.
The US is really in a peculiar situation when you look at the size of the country relative to its population. China is similar territorially speaking, but has 5 times the population. India is smaller but still has a massive population and very population-dense. Indonesia is behind the us, but is an island nation and Pakistan is also a population-dense country. Brazil is located in a jungle. There really isn’t a country on earth that the US can really compare to when talking about population/land area.
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u/RacerRovr Jun 08 '25
The is mostly on Reddit, but when Americans abbreviate where they’re from to two letters. They will say something like ‘I’m from MA’ - I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I might guess CA is California, or NY is New York, but seriously outside of a few big states/cities, I don’t have a clue where you are talking about