Forum: ell.stackexchange.com
Tags: <word-request>
Title: What do you call the movement you do by car within a local distance?
Question: If you move from a place to another by feet, you call it a walk. A long distance displacement by any means can be called trip, travel, journey. But what about small distances, like inside your own town, (e.g. by taxi). What is the most appropriated word?  "Yesterday I made a __ from Brooklyn to Queens (in my car)".

Answers:
sents: text: "Trip" is fine and doesn't carry any implication that it covered a long distance.
text: In my experience it would be the most common and ordinary word to use.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/5937/hobbs
score: 10
sents: text: That is called a drive.
text: Though I'm not sure I'd call it that if I traveled by taxi, I'd probably call that a ride or a trip.
text: A drive is if I drive there myself, the passengers take rides or trips.
text: Edit: This qualifies as slang just barely, so
text: I'll note that I speak American English.
text: You may have different answers from other regions.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/20120/modulusshift
score: 8
sents: text: The general activity is driving, no matter the distance.
text: You can qualify the trip as a 'short drive' if you really want to structure the sentence the way you did (but see a bit further down on other ways you might express the same thing).
text: In general, English tends to prefer to use phrases like this to express specific concepts instead of using special words.
text: There are, as with anything in English, exceptions to this practice, but you will almost always be understood if you choose to phrase things this way instead of using more specific nouns.
text: You might also hear 'short trip' used in the same way, which has largely the same meaning but doesn't necessarily imply that any particular vehicle (or any vehicle at all for that matter) was used, just that the person traveled a short distance from one location to the other.
text: However, I would probably not structure things this way in the first place.
text: At least in the American Midwest, it's far more common when you're specifying
text: both the point of origin and the destination to just say that you drove from the first location to the second location.
text: So, your example might instead be better worded as "Yesterday I drove from Brooklyn to Queens".
text: Note how this does not try to qualify the distance traveled, because that's usually implicitly known (or at least, generically understood) based on the two locations that were mentioned.
text: This also can be easily extended to include the exact distance if required.
text: Going a bit further, if you were known to be somewhere specific at the time you started traveling to the destination, you might just omit the point of origin altogether and simply say you made a short drive to your destination.
text: Using your example, if you were known to be in Brooklyn yesterday, you could instead say: 'I took a short drive to Queens yesterday."
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/60565/Austin Hemmelgarn
score: 2
sents: text: "Short drive" or "short trip" are both perfectly idiomatic.
text: A more colloquial expression for a short trip is a " hop " (see definitions under nouns and phrases), for example: It's a short hop to the local store.
text: It is used as an informal way of referring to any short journey, especially one you might make regularly.
text: When speaking about a regular journey that you make, such as a daily commute to work, it is idiomatic to refer to any hop/trip/journey using the indefinite article, for example: Yesterday I made the short hop from Brooklyn to Queens in my car.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/66325/Astralbee
score: 2
sents: text: Aside from words mentioned in other answers, like "trip" and "drive", you might also hear it simply as: Yesterday I drove from Brooklyn to Queens.
text: The distance might often be implied by context, i.e. the listener is familiar with the places, and the distance between them.
text: If you didn't expect they'd be familiar, you might actually say something like (if you really wanted to express the idea of it being a short distance):
text: Yesterday I drove from Brooklyn to Queens, which isn't too far.
text: Or, as said by @Astralbee, you might describe it as a "short" trip or drive.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/103986/Chris Mack
score: 1

Summary of the answers:
You might also hear 'short trip' used in the same way, which has largely the same meaning but doesn't necessarily imply that any particular vehicle (or any vehicle at all for that matter) was used, just that the person travelled a short distance from one location to the other. 
The following possibilities are an option: "a trip", "a drive", "a short drive", "a short trip" or "a hop".