In America

Despite thinking I really should avoid the USA I was back again in 2024 – after visits in 2022 and 2023 – and I’ve blogged on Charleston, Kansas City, St Louis and road-tripping across the state of Missouri. Although I did not get to the state of Kansas (I really thought I would at least set foot in the state while I was in Kansas City) I am down to just three states unvisited of the 50: Kansas, Mississippi and Alabama.

▲ Der Wankpanzer

Giant SUVs
They’re Truckzillas in Australia, but the true giant of the US roads is the Tesla Cybertruck – better known as a Wankpanzer – and tipping the scales at over 3000kg, that’s over 6600 lbs, so well over 3 US ‘short tons’ and pretty damn close to 3 ‘long tons.’ The trouble is that these overweight vehicles are killers, not for their drivers and occupants, but for everybody else on the road. An article in The Economist – Americans Love Affair with Big Cars is Killing Them – pinpointed the problem: ‘For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.’ When a Godzilla whacks into a family in a small car you can guess who loses.

▲ A Chevrolet Truckzilla (in the snow) in Kansas City

Check the figures (thank you Wikipedia), for every 100,000 inhabitants the USA kills 12.9 people per year in traffic-related accidents, versus Australia 4.5, Germany (despite those speed-limit-free autobahns) 3.7 and Canada 5.3. OK Americans drive a lot, so let’s look at the death rate per billion vehicle km – USA 6.9, Australia 4.9, Germany 4.2 and Canada 4.3. Of course the really bad places are developing world – bad driving and bad vehicles, you don’t want to think what motorcycles do to young people in Thailand.

On the other hand compared to some places – Australia for example – Americans don’t seem to drive with one hand ready to hit the horn all the time. So that’s one nicer thing about driving in the USA, even if you are more likely to die.

Flying in the USA
The first thing you notice is the line-up of wheelchairs, it’s like a large percentage of the passenger list can’t even get on the aircraft without being wheeled there. It’s even more noticeable as you exit the aircraft, you step out of the door to be confronted by a traffic jam of wheelchairs waiting to wheel passengers away.

And a curious safety difference. Elsewhere in the world I’m accustomed to being told to open your window blinds at departure and as you’re about to land. The reasoning is that if something wrong happens it’s a very good thing to be able to see it out of your window. A good example? The runway collision on 2 January 2024 when a Japan Airlines Airbus A350-900 landing at Tokyo Haneda Airport collided with a Japan Coast Guard aircraft which had strayed on to the runway. The A350 was totally destroyed but every single one of the 379 passengers and crew escaped the aircraft safely (a dog and a cat on board were not so lucky, nor were five of six crew on the Coast Guard aircraft).

The fact that passenger could see the chaos that was taking place out the windows was cited as one of the contributors to the successful evacuation. I’m pretty sure we used to be told to open the window blinds on US flights in the past. Not anymore, only the passengers in exit rows are instructed to open their blinds.

Extra Large
It’s really a joke, at a Starbucks your coffee can be short, tall, grande, venti and even trenta, but do not for a moment consider you could simply ask for small, medium or large. Generally things start with a tall which equates to 360ml. Big is usually the order of the day and amusingly that even runs to a glass of water in a restaurant, I became accustomed to being confronted with a glass of water so large that a quick visit to the toilet was the next requirement. On the other hand ask for a glass of water and that’s exactly what you’ll get. There rarely seemed to be an attempt to up-sell you to mineral water (‘plain or sparkling?’) which is the usual story in Australia or the UK.

▲ Rockefeller Ice Skating – My US travels also took me to New York City just before Christmas and is there a scene more redolent of the city and the season than the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza?

◄ Or think shopping, New York and Christmas and naturally you’re heading to Fifth Avenue where Louis Vuitton had turned a whole building into a stack of Louis Vuitton trunks.

Tipping
That US plague, tipping, is only getting worse. You’ll get your bill (‘check’ that is) and then there’s the ‘and how much do you intend to tip’ connection, often starting with 20% and heading skywards from there. In one New York bar, however, I was about to add in that almost compulsory tip when I read the small print that they’d already added an 18% service charge ‘to be distributed amongst the staff!’

This really annoyed me and I scratched out my tip and returned it to the original total. Afterwards Google told me this New York ‘service charge’ was a new policy which people were not at all enthusiastic about and you were absolutely entitled to believe you had tipped and didn’t need to tip again.

Other things
Does anybody use their indicators in cars? Not much although, on the other hand, they’re generally very polite to pedestrians. In Kansas City being nice to pedestrians wasn’t really necessary, because there hardly seemed to be any cars on the streets. The roads were amazingly empty.

And does anybody walk up escalators? Not much in New York City where people step on to the escalators and just stand there, waiting to be conveyed up or down. I found myself really missing the London tube station rule: stand on the right, walk on the left.

Early Chinese tourists to Europe were warned that things didn’t move so fast: ‘don’t expect to get served quickly or efficiently.’ They would have really got upset in 2024 in a New York City Whole Food Supermarket, where things either seemed to move super-slowly. Or not at all: ‘is there nobody to serve coffee?’ I asked near the empty coffee stand in the Columbus Circle Whole Foods outlet. ‘They’re on their break,’ I was told. ‘They will be back in 45 minutes.’ Meanwhile if you want a coffee, go somewhere else.

◄  There’s a very slow moving Whole Food Supermarket underneath these towers beside Columbus Circle.