Ask Lemmy

I travel a lot throughout the US, and sometimes the changes are obvious while other times I can be driving and not entirely sure which state I'm in just from looking around on the highway. As others have said while driving on a major highway a clue can be a huge store full of items like fireworks just across the border from a state they aren't legal in.

The geography and environment can certainly be a big clue. Driving through West Virginia there are tunnels through large mountains, Pennsylvania around the Pittsburgh area has steel bridges, Louisiana has highways raised up from the muck, there are mountains that the highways wind around in North Carolina that give way to pretty flat highways as you go south. Kentucky has long depressing stretches of straight boring road. I've noticed even traffic patterns can say things as Georgia highways always have a higher number of semitrucks than anywhere else for example. Nevada is flat and open but as you go into Utah it gets windy and rocky, and cell signal usually goes out for a bit.

Staying in different states I notice alcohol sales rules are different. In some states you basically don't see any alcohol outside of designated stores for it including no beer at gas stations, in other states you see beer for sale widely but hard liquor only at designated stores, and in other states hard liquor at WalMart is perfectly normal.

I've found on the whole that people are actually nicer than average in Utah. While coffee shops exist I have noticed in offices there is often a lack of a central coffee machine.

Louisiana everyone I deal with from there has a tendency to be much more relaxed than average about showing up exactly on time for things. Louisiana itself also has a cultural divide between the northern part which is more generic US south, and the southern part which has the more creole and tourist heavy atmosphere.

I honestly don't mind Ohio. I know it's an internet meme to hate it, but aside from their obsession with dumping chili on unrelated foods it's decent. Has a strong blue collar streak kind of like Pennsylvania culture.

Texas has a big cowboy influence and they don't let you not know it. The roads tend to big big and wide which is great, except the freeways especially in Dallas can become confusing multilevel nightmares.

California has lots of Spanish signs, lots of first generation Mexicans who bring culture with them. Lots of for example Mexican super markets. Californians have a culture of going FAST on freeways if there isn't gridlock traffic, in some cases going 100mph just barely keeps you up with traffic.

The roads get better, the drivers get worse, there's jughandles everywhere, they won't let me pump my own gas, and there's liquor stores that aren't owned by the state.

Also I have to cross a river, and pretty much everything gets flatter.

For the other borders, mostly the same. One direction you start seeing more places serving crab, another has no sales tax, one is just boring and depressing, and the other unless you cross at some very specific places is mostly just woods and farms and shit that kind of blend into our own but with better roads.

In NJ all the gas stations are full service only. If you try to start pumping your own gas the attendant will start yelling at you telling you to stop

One state is across a big river. Marijuana is mostly legal on the other side so the billboards start as you get close to the bridges.

The other state is culturally and geographically identical to the other side of the border. If you look closely you'll see that private liquor stores are allowed, as well as payday lending. That's it.

You start seeing sap buckets hanging off utility poles.

One comment mentioned that some things are legal in one state but illegal in another.
And I also remember that laws in general are often quite different between states.

So, I am wondering if there exist some kind of controls near state borders to catch illegal stuff and practices (or even wanted persons?) crossing the border?

You should bounce from Alabama to Mississippi, night and day difference, which is funny because Americans lump the two states together.

We drive hundreds and hundreds of miles a year through backwoods Alabama highways, thence into Mississippi. There is one short stretch where the road is messed up. Going into Mississippi, the road turns to crap instantly, even the US highways are somehow underfunded.

Gas stations in AL are neat enough, in MS there's trash flying around everywhere. For that matter, you can tell by the small towns. Alabama side? Generally charming, though poverty is bad. Pass into Mississippi? Next town you come to will be a wasteland of poverty and ground down infrastructure.

Forest drops quickly in favor of farmland. AL is the most forested state in America. MS countryside looks more like Oklahoma.

Going from Florida into Alabama, you really can't tell without a sign, and there usually is one, or Google Maps announces it. The landscape and forests don't change until you've gone a ways north or west. Takes awhile to start seeing hills! Florida's the flattest state in America.

Like others have said, the roads here tell you.

Specifically, when you cross State Line Road, you've crossed the state line.

I don't live near the border but on a road trip I noticed an immediate difference in the quality of the road surface when I entered Alabama coming from Florida. Florida has pretty good roads. Alabama, uhh, not so much. Mississippi and Louisiana roads were also terrible. Texas was better but the quality was spottier.

I used to live in the US and travel a lot by car. The infrastructure, specifically the roads, their striping, their guardrails, etc. could change drastically at state borders. They could sometimes even be of different quality and material at county borders within a state.

The road surface materials and condition of the road changes.

Some states/towns limit billboards and tall sign poles. And some are very maximalist about it.

There’s a spot near me where 3 intersect right on the road. The pavement is in a different state of disrepair for each. You can see it and hear it driving along.

There often aren't major cultural differences, not the abruptly, but there still can be changes. Sometimes the road will be 2 lanes on one side and 4 on the other. Sometimes you'll see a ton of new billboards on one side and not the other because they just bought a bunch in one state. Architecture? Not so much, I don't think, though it could be in some areas. Generally if someone is actively picking something while they're there,like building a house, it won't change, but if it's someone picking or choosing something from afar like what a road should be like or what to advertise it can change abruptly.

A good example is that in the past (not so much now), I-75 going south into Georgia began to have a ton of weird pro life billboards and Christian billboards once you cross the state line. Since then they have passed the line, but for real, it was a very abrupt change from none to tons of pictures of fetuses and talking points about when "your baby's" heart beat begins. As well as weird pictures of an apocalypse and Jesus that just sort of says "do you have a decision to make?" With no context.

I actually signed that last one's website's guest book to tell them the domain name on their signs was wrong, which was hilarious to me. It seems like the site would come before the billboards, so why wouldn't they notice the billboards had the wrong site? It was something like org instead of com, pretty minor. But sure enough they changed the billboards next time I went to Florida. So clearly someone is maintaining that site and those billboards. I just checked and it's still up, but it looks like they have some redirects now. So, maybe they fixed some stuff or my memory is fuzzy, this was probably about 10 years ago, definitely pre COVID though.

Yeah. Drive into South Carolina and the atmosphere just feels like you’ve rolled around on a truck stop bathroom floor. Then there’s all the fireworks stands, DUI defense attorney billboards, shit roads, Palmetto signs, etc. I think they just got Jersey Mike’s because I saw a bunch of plaques for them on the exits.

When I lived in the Midwest one of the clearest signals (aside from the obvious signage) was the college football team swag on cars and in front of houses.

I once lived in a small city right on that state's border. It was sort of a suburb tho to a very large city in the neighboring state. The major roads would have signage, but on the smaller roads there really wasn't any way to tell. The main difference tho was that the large city's public transit options extended pretty far out even into the small towns along the border, but wouldn't at all come into my small city..

Where I live now, you have to cross a very large river to get into the neighboring state. What's worth sharing here tho, is that there is a nearby county line, where even tho there's a sign, you don't need it at all. The landscape/biome changes pretty much at the county line.
It goes from a sort of temperate rainforest-like climate, to arid grassland/high desert climate. You'll be driving thru areas with large, old growth evergreens and lots of ferns underneath, and then it turns to dead, dry, brown grass and sagebrush shrubs everywhere. Like, it could also even be raining the whole first part of the drive there, but once you get to this county line the rain almost always dissipates. It's pretty wild.

this is such an adorable question.

The time on my phone changed.