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Comment by jurie | Hacker News Reader

Albertan here; we're flat and our roads are straight, but we also measure distances by travel time, whether in the city ("I live 20 minutes from the mall") or across the province ("Calgary is three hours from Edmonton").

I suspect that it's a western thing more than a terrain thing. I wonder if that applies to the western USA as well?

Another interesting thing that I've noticed is that Europeans and North Americans have a very different concept of historical time and relative distance. To me, a building that has stood for 100 years is OLD, and 200km (Somewhere that's "about an hour and a half to two hours away") is a day trip that's nothing out of the ordinary. When I was in the UK, I noticed that people held the opposite view - 100 years ago was just yesterday, relatively speaking, while traveling 200km for a day trip was inconceivable.

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I'm from Boston, and I think it's most common to ask in distance, and answer in time. "How far is it?" "20 minutes." I'm a map geek and often answer in distance, which often prompts, "And about how far is that? Like 20 minutes?"

as a european, in canada and the US I was constantly confused by directions. america uses street names and cardinal directions (turn north on I-??? then west on ...). europeans think in terms of sequences of towns (to get to munich I must drive on the autobahn via Stuttgart, Ulm, Augsburg).

I once travelled from toronto to chicago by car and decided to write down my own directions from google maps because I felt the ones provided were useless. Boy, was I lost when I didnt see a roadsign for windsor/detroit.

That's funny.

Here's a thought: the reason for the difference is due to how New World cities were artificially made rectangular whereas the Old World cities have a concentric circles growing out feel to them.

Go on Google Maps and look at a city like Montreal and you'll see that the streets are very rectangular.

Look at a city like Paris and you'll see a spiderweb instead of rectangles.

In the UK Google Maps does road numbers wrong. So A4042 should be "ay four o four two" but Maps says the less efficient "ay four thousand and forty-two" (it's also wrong, it's a code not a number; like calling 0b20 "twenty").

It throws me much more than it should.

0h20! lol ... there are 10 types of people in the world ...

Another aspect may be the influence of the States in Western Canada. Time is understandable to both Canadians/foreigners. Kilometres, not necessarily.

In Ireland, we went metric in the 1980s, but people still measured distances in miles until the road signs went fully metric about 15 years ago. Now (older) people measure distances in time, because they can't remember the distance in miles and can't grep kms.

US West checking in: Commutes/travel by duration, exercise and directions by distance.

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