Fly or drive?

[HalifaxTravaler]

Myself i love a good roadtrip.In may,i am planning on going to Charlotte NC from Nova Scotia Canada.I plan on  making it a 3 day run.That should put me with  comfortablr 10-12 hr drive each day.I am staying 7 nights in NC so if i were to fly id have to rent a car while im there,so i figure i can do it cheaper by taking my own car.Besides ill get to see a ton of country which i will enjoy.Not sure where my nightly stops are going to be yet though.So,as i said, the road trip wins.lol.

[AZDude]

I'm not afraid to fly, but if there is a road, I'll drive.  If I could, I would drive to the southern tip of South America! 

[corco]

I'm not afraid to fly, but if there is a road, I'll drive.  If I could, I would drive to the southern tip of South America!  

You can...technically....if you're not scared of getting killed in the Darien Gap and have a Jeep  

[english si]

Not that I can legally drive at the moment, but I think it would be different on a case to case basis for me. Time it takes driving, the purpose of the visit, whether I'd need a car at the destination, cost, how much stuff I have, whether the train or plane would get me close enough to my destination and quicker than a car, whether the drive would be a good one or a dull one.

Not that, if I was able to drive, I wouldn't want to drive to Eastern Europe, with the journey being much of the holiday, or go on an epic US roadtrip, but I'd fly/take the train to get to the Mediterranean for a beach holiday, ditto if I was going somewhere on a city break (eg Edinburgh, Paris, Prague, Rome, Barcelona).

[J N Winkler]

In my experience, city breaks are more an European than a North American thing, simply because the spread of cities with user-friendly transit (i.e., something better than buses only) is wider.  I have lived in both continents and I find it more attractive to do city breaks in Europe because I don't have to worry about being stranded without a car or having to deal with buses.

For Americans, business conventions tend to be the major exception to the "no city breaks" rule.  Promoting conventions is typically a major focus of urban economic development efforts and often includes co-locating high-rise hotels near conference centers so that the convention-goers can access everything on foot, or take advantage of higher density of transit provision in downtown.  In Wichita, for example, the city has a part share in the Hyatt Regency, which is within easy walking distance of the auditoriums at Century II.  My experience, though, is that the cities which are found to be most attractive by convention organizers tend already to have rail-based transit (think Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington, etc.), with resort destinations like Las Vegas and Honolulu being the major exceptions.

In Europe there are some cities which do well as tourist destinations without having rail-based transit (think Florence, which has no subway, or Turin and Seville, which are only just now starting to build theirs), but they have the advantage of relatively short walking distances between the main railway station and the districts where cheap lodging can be found.  In contradistinction, in a place like Kansas City it is a major schlep from the airport to the main hotel district and the tourist attractions are somewhat dispersed (even the ones that are compactly located, like Country Club Plaza and, say, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, still require a considerable amount of walking, and it is not a practical proposition to walk from there to other sights of interest such as the Liberty Memorial).  The one time I went to a convention in Kansas City, it was held at a hotel near the airport and excursions to Country Club Plaza etc. were available via hotel shuttle, the trip taking close to an hour each way.

[mightyace]

For Americans, business conventions tend to be the major exception to the "no city breaks" rule.

There are other exceptions, but they are exceptions:

Memphis, TN gets tourists for Elvis, Jazz and, possibly, BBQ.  Memphis has a small trolley loop downtown but otherwise just buses.

Nashville, TN gets tourists for Country (and other) Music and we have a skeletal bus service and one commuter rail line.

[english si]

Vegas gets city breaks (though it's more a large theme park type-thing called The Strip in a city than the city itself that people go for). OK, it's got the monorail as rail based transit, but that's an expensive white elephant. I guess you could count the few small shuttles that link casinos (eg the one going either way from the Luxor) as rail-based transit.

[AZDude]

I'm not afraid to fly, but if there is a road, I'll drive.  If I could, I would drive to the southern tip of South America! 

You can...technically....if you're not scared of getting killed in the Darien Gap and have a Jeep 

Not just that but being kidnapped in Mexico, and the fact that I only speak english.

[corco]

Mexico would be about 5th on my list of worries getting to the tip of South America. Colombia would be the fun part