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Comment by MrDunham | Hacker News Reader

Having moved to Columbus a couple years ago everyone loved to say that over 60% of the US population is within a one day drive of Columbus.

For the Bay Area readers the distance from Cleveland to Columbus is roughly the same as San Francisco to Sacramento

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It's hard to understate just how driveable this side of the country is from Ohio. In about 7 hours one direction you are in Chicago. 7 hours another direction you are in Toronto. 7 hours another direction you are in NYC, or DC, or Boston. Stretch it to 15 hours or so and you can drive all the way to New Orleans, or most of Florida in that time, and anywhere in between. Anywhere east of the Mississippi really is seemingly doable for a road trip in about a days drive, especially if you are driving in shifts. You can get flights pretty fast as well, but the issue is the ohio airports have limited direct connections; its frequent to fly to ohare or charlotte first. It's not like LAX where you can score a direct flight to half the western US from southwest for $59.

>Stretch it to 15 hours or so and you can drive all the way to New Orleans

Having done this, I would recommend it only in urgency

Much less congestion as well. I drive between them weekly and rarely see traffic anywhere close to California. It's a pretty comfortable 2 hour drive.

Highways do back up in Cleveland and Columbus in the cities during rush hour though, as well as when there is any construction or accidents or inclimate weather.

One thing I noticed is that the freeways in, say, Cleveland, are all 5 lanes wide or so in each direction, serving a population of 400k in the city and 1.2m in the county. You go to LA and what do you see? The same size freeways as Cleveland, 5 lanes wide or so, only its serving a city of 4 million and a county of 15 million. It's like, of course there is no congestion in Cleveland and tons of congestion in LA, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see an issue with capacity. There's literally an order of magnitude more people using the same capacity of infrastructure.

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