AHC: the entire US like the northeast corridor

The northeast corridor (Boston/New York/Philadelphia/Baltimore/Washington) has a reputation, deserved or otherwise, for being frenetic, stressed, hyper, get-it-done-yesterday, angst-ridden...you get the idea. How could the entire nation become like that, including California and the rural South? I'm talking a nation where driving 5 mph over the limit on the interstate is considered slow, overnight delivery is the longest tolerable, and there's a constant, relentless atmosphere of more and faster.
 
The northeast corridor (Boston/New York/Philadelphia/Baltimore/Washington) has a reputation, deserved or otherwise, for being frenetic, stressed, hyper, get-it-done-yesterday, angst-ridden...you get the idea. How could the entire nation become like that, including California and the rural South? I'm talking a nation where driving 5 mph over the limit on the interstate is considered slow, overnight delivery is the longest tolerable, and there's a constant, relentless atmosphere of more and faster.
Well for starters you have issues with population density. Remember, if you had the population density of the City of Philadelphia throughout the entire country, you'd be able to put the entire world population in the USA.
 
Make people as interconnected as possible as early as possible. More media coverage, some form of social media earlier, more high-speed transportation between cities and ways to reach the rural areas effectively.
 
The northeast corridor (Boston/New York/Philadelphia/Baltimore/Washington) has a reputation, deserved or otherwise, for being frenetic, stressed, hyper, get-it-done-yesterday, angst-ridden...you get the idea. How could the entire nation become like that, including California and the rural South? I'm talking a nation where driving 5 mph over the limit on the interstate is considered slow, overnight delivery is the longest tolerable, and there's a constant, relentless atmosphere of more and faster.

If you drive 5 mph over the interstate in the rural South, you are indeed driving slow.

But get more urban sprawl. California has plenty. The South might be doable (if you set your goal as 2050), if you get more development/migration earlier than the 80s, so you can have a corridor of urban sprawl along the I-75/I-24 corridor from Atlanta to just over the Kentucky border and along the I-65 corridor from Bowling Green to Birmingham.

Outside of California, parts of the Midwest, and the South, that's basically impossible without another 50-100 million Americans. Even that vision of the South is probably impossible without some extreme luck and brilliance and just outright favouritism toward the South for development (and thus a draw for people from elsewhere). There's so much rural land by the interstate highways I mentioned, including hard to develop land (very expensive) like the Cumberland Plateau.

So really, you'd need a cultural shift, but if you're in rural Nebraska or something, that's gonna be pretty difficult to have take hold there. Even if there's more areas of the country which could have that sort of development.
 
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