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Comment by rwallace | Hacker News Reader

> BTW the transformation is visible in literature, which is how I noticed it. The sense of geography in, say, Jane Austin is completely alien to today

Now I'm curious, don't remember such a difference, but then it's been a long time since I read Jane Austen. Don't suppose you could put your finger on exactly how she handles geography that a writer like Stephen King or China Mieville doesn't?

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At a guess, previous generations would talk in terms of distance-to-destination, whereas we talk in terms of time-to-destination. They would think of a highway and a neighborhood as having the same "speed limit" (foot or horse-and-cart). We, with cars, think of highways as having a much lower time cost (or higher time efficiency) than neighborhood roads.

This seems more of a U.K. vs U.S. difference in custom. Perhaps because the country is much smaller and more built up.

Not really.

In developing countries this shift has already happened ('distance' to 'time') due to things like traffic jams, inconsistent infrastructure (some routes are longer but faster due to lesser traffic signals or better maintained etc.)

Maybe it would not be wrong to assert that this shift is more in force in developing countries than other places. This could be due to unpredictableness. The routes that are optimal now - takes less time - can change in matter of minutes/hours (due to procession/rallies, rains, accidents, school & office timings, power failure - leading to stoppage of traffic signals, etc.)

Google maps always give multiple routes to a destination and they differ in terms of time to destination (distance to destination is seen as secondary information on map interface).

> In developing countries this shift has already happened ('distance' to 'time') due to things like traffic jams, inconsistent infrastructure (some routes are longer but faster due to lesser traffic signals or better maintained etc.)

Then I guess Germany has not yet developed. But when talking about places people always specify the distance. Berlin is 584 km away from Munich, not 5 hours and 15 minutes. Talking about time to destination is something I have exclusively seen Americans do. Maybe that's because in the US distance and time are basically the same, since everybody takes the car and drives at the speed limit. But in Germany there is no general speed limit, and you might also decide to take the train or airplane to Berlin (and may people do) at which point talking about time would be confusing at best.

Before trains were introduced in Germany, distance was often given in time it takes to walk (Wegstunde, lit. "way hour"). Early trains even advertised how many hours you can cover in mere minutes. People then probably realised how silly that sounds when more and more train lines where built and dropped that in favour of distance.

> At a guess, previous generations would talk in terms of distance-to-destination, whereas we talk in terms of time-to-destination

I guess this must be a 20th-century phenomenon limited to industrialized nations. My grandparents' generation, who lived in the Carpathian Mountains and relied on cows and wooden-made carts for their method of transportation (when not going on foot), definitely only used time-to-destination. I've never ever heard my grandma' say anything about kilometers, meters, or the like.

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