How to get around United States

Understanding how Americans actually move

The United States is built around two networks, and neither of them is the railway. Domestic aviation carries the long distances -- a coast-to-coast flight is five to six hours against several days of driving -- and the Interstate highway system carries everything else. Outside a handful of cities, the car is not a convenience but the assumed default, and a trip planned without one will quietly fail.

Flying

Major carriers connect essentially every sizeable city, usually through a hub, and internal fares are competitive enough that flying a thousand miles often costs less than the equivalent European journey. The rule that catches visitors is identification rather than ticketing: REAL ID enforcement began on 7 May 2025, and to board a domestic flight you now need a compliant licence or another acceptable document. A valid passport is accepted in its place, which is what most foreign visitors will be using anyway -- carry it for internal sectors, not only for the international one.

Driving

Hiring a car is how most of the country is seen, and the Interstates make it straightforward: limited-access, well signed, and numbered on a grid where even numbers run east-west and odd numbers north-south. Distances are the thing to respect. A day's driving in the western states can cover ground that would cross several European countries, fuel stops thin out sharply in the interior, and mountain passes and desert crossings have their own seasons. Rules are set by the states, so speed limits, turning on red and alcohol rules all change at a state line.

Trains

Amtrak reaches over 500 destinations in 46 states across more than 30 routes, which sounds comprehensive and is not the same thing as frequent: outside the Northeast Corridor most long-distance routes run once a day or less, and they are best understood as journeys rather than transport. The Northeast Corridor, between Washington, New York and Boston, is the exception and genuinely beats flying city-centre to city-centre.

Cities and transit

Public transport is strong in New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston and San Francisco, and patchy to absent elsewhere. In most other cities the practical pattern is to fly in, use ride-hailing within the centre, and pick the car up on the way out rather than paying to park it downtown.

Parks

If the trip includes more than two or three federal sites, the America the Beautiful annual pass is the instrument to know about: it covers entrance and standard day-use fees on National Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers land, and the resident annual pass is $80.

The identification rule, which is newer than most guidance

REAL ID enforcement began on 7 May 2025. To board a domestic commercial flight a traveller must present a REAL ID-compliant licence or another acceptable form of identification, and the TSA states plainly that a passport may be used instead. For a foreign visitor this is usually a non-event -- the passport is in the bag -- but it matters in two situations: a domestic sector flown on a day when the passport has been left in a hotel safe, and a hire car booked on a licence that is fine for driving and not sufficient for flying. They are different documents doing different jobs.

Why the car decision is the whole itinerary

In most of the world the question is whether to hire a car. Here it is where to collect and return it, because the cost of having one in a transit city is real -- overnight parking in a downtown garage is one of the larger line items a trip can carry -- while the cost of not having one outside those cities is that the trip does not work. The pattern that solves it is to treat the five transit cities as car-free and to collect the vehicle at the airport on the way out of them.

State lines are legal borders

Speed limits, right turns on a red light, alcohol sales, and what a police stop expects of you are state matters, and they change the moment you cross. So do park and campsite fee structures. This is not pedantry: it is the single most common way a visitor who has driven confidently for a week suddenly gets something wrong.

The railway is a journey, not a shortcut

Amtrak's long-distance routes -- the California Zephyr, the Coast Starlight, the Empire Builder -- are worth taking for their own sake and are a poor way to be somewhere by Tuesday. Book them as the experience they are. The Northeast Corridor is the one stretch where the train is simply the best way to travel, and it should be used that way.