Now I'm curious, don't remember such a difference, but then it's been a long time since I read Jane Austen. Don't suppose you could put your finger on exactly how she handles geography that a writer like Stephen King or China Mieville doesn't?
I guess this must be a 20th-century phenomenon limited to industrialized nations. My grandparents' generation, who lived in the Carpathian Mountains and relied on cows and wooden-made carts for their method of transportation (when not going on foot), definitely only used time-to-destination. I've never ever heard my grandma' say anything about kilometers, meters, or the like.
In developing countries this shift has already happened ('distance' to 'time') due to things like traffic jams, inconsistent infrastructure (some routes are longer but faster due to lesser traffic signals or better maintained etc.)
Maybe it would not be wrong to assert that this shift is more in force in developing countries than other places. This could be due to unpredictableness. The routes that are optimal now - takes less time - can change in matter of minutes/hours (due to procession/rallies, rains, accidents, school & office timings, power failure - leading to stoppage of traffic signals, etc.)
Google maps always give multiple routes to a destination and they differ in terms of time to destination (distance to destination is seen as secondary information on map interface).
Then I guess Germany has not yet developed. But when talking about places people always specify the distance. Berlin is 584 km away from Munich, not 5 hours and 15 minutes. Talking about time to destination is something I have exclusively seen Americans do. Maybe that's because in the US distance and time are basically the same, since everybody takes the car and drives at the speed limit. But in Germany there is no general speed limit, and you might also decide to take the train or airplane to Berlin (and may people do) at which point talking about time would be confusing at best.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932...
Even according to Google Trends "Greenwich village" is 6.5 times more popular than "Vinegar Hill", let alone some rooftop bar.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Greenwich%20Villa...
Anyway, Greenwich Village still shows up as a neighborhood label at a range of zoom levels, just not the particular scale for this image.
Google has become good at telling you what you used to know versus what you want to discover
> Over the course of a year, Google quietly turned its map inside-out – transforming it from a road map into a place map.
I've long been amazed how we somehow transitioned during the early 20th century from a mental model of roads and paths running through locations to places (house lots, etc) being the spaces between the roads. It's a natural thing to happen, but one of those invisible flips that happens on a timescale longer than a human lifetime.
But this anticipates the opposite: if you can stop worrying about how to get somewhere (because you don't have to drive or plan much -- self-driving or Lyft-style services can take care of the route planning) you can focus on the destination.
We see this phenomenon in subway maps which are famously schematic and not geographical.
(BTW the transformation is visible in literature, which is how I noticed it. The sense of geography in, say, Jane Austin is completely alien to today).