renegade7 said:
It is my understanding that in the US we drive greater distances, in Europe most drivers use cars for short trips and public transportation for longer ones. So for practical purposes, the time it can get take to get somewhere is more important when understanding the trip than the distance.
So if someone asks me "How far away is Peoria from Chicago?" then my assumption will usually be that that person is planning to drive there and wants to know when they should leave. The route itself is not anything like a straight line, so giving the linear distance seems kind of pointless.
I think there's also a cultural effect at play. Americans, at least based on my experiences travelling in other countries, are much more insistent than Europeans that things be on time and much more concerned with how long things will take. Go to an American city, and almost everyone is wearing a watch, on the other hand when I was in Europe watches were not nearly as common. Ask an American what time it is, and they'll be able to answer to a precision of at least a quarter of an hour without even looking at the time and if they do then they will tell you exactly, rounded to the nearest 5 minutes, they are constantly aware of what time it is. When I was in Europe and I asked for the time most people would just give the hour, like if it was 4:37 then they would say "4"; an American would be more likely to say "4:30" or "4:35". Just my experience.
Ehh... That's an incredibly, seriously broad over-generalisation.
Ask an English person the time they'll likely give it to you to the nearest 15 minutes. Same with a dutch person.
Ask a German, they'll probably do a little better. Might even give you the exact minute.
(Then again, Germans are considered to be rather obsessed with precision and punctuality. Train conductors apparently hand out notes to passengers if the train is late, so that people can show their boss)
Ask someone in Spain, Italy or Portugal though, and you'll probably get some rather vague answer that's only very approximately correct.
Talking about 'Europe' like it's one consistent, homogenous mass belies the fact that there's so many different countries, with so many different cultures and ways of life, that doing so actually makes very little sense.
The french aren't the Germans, who aren't Dutch, Who aren't English, who aren't Italian, who aren't Swedish, and so on and so forth.
This is as evident in time-keeping as it is in other areas of these cultures.