My step daughter would ask that driving from the Memphis airport to Little Rock.
I would point out a mileage sign, tell her we were doing 75 mph and work out the math.
I believe she figured that out eventually.
You could make other people sick by reading?
For over a decade I took 10 year-olds on an annual school trip with about 2 hours travel.
The first “Are we there yet?” usually came about 10 minutes in…
I always heard it as “Are we nearly there yet?”
I rarely asked, because my parents let me have the map, so I could follow our progress as we went. When I got a bit older, they let me navigate. I thought main roads were boring, so I used to take the “scenic routes”. To my dad’s credit, he almost always followed my directions. 
Yeah, we always said ‘are we nearly there yet?’ with a nice whiny emphasis on the ‘nearly’.
We thought we had solved this minor, though irritating, problem by telling the children how many towns we still had to pass through. Then they could keep count and feel as though they had a little understanding of the process. (Even though they didn’t know that some towns were farther apart than others. Surprise!)
That helped.
Then they started with, “Make him stay on his own side.”
Then, “She’s staring at me.”
It’s the fake English accent. Does it every time.
The iphones don’t tell the kids when they’ve arrived?
There should be an app for that.
As a child, I received early instruction in mapreading, which I now understand was to head me off from asking.
I could read the road signs and do the math by first grade or so.
Same approach my dad took on our 2500 mile runs to the relatives each summer; he made it out to be like a military operation. Always planning the next stop, where to spend the night, figuring out his fuel consumption and trying to best his last time. By god we actually made it from Dayton Ohio to Lubbock Texas in 22 hours one time; not a small feat with a wife and three kids with you.
Nope, never said it. I was dragged around the midwest to racetracks every weekend from birth to about age 10, so I was accustomed to being tossed into a vehicle for anywhere from minutes to hours, with no idea how far away the place was where we were going. As I got older, I learned to love reading maps. So I’d grab Dad’s trusty Rand McNally atlas, ask about our destination, and then track every stinkin’ mile. I was pretty young when Dad started asking me which exit he should take. I turned out to be a damn fine navigator. By the time I was a teenager, he’d make my stepmom sit in the backseat so I could sit up front and navigate. So I would calculate miles and time and announce our progress, approximately every 2-5 minutes.
:: face palm :: Gah, that must have been more annoying than “Are we there yet?” “We will be there in 22.8 minutes!”
The words “Are we there yet” never passed my lips. By the time I was old enough to speak I had noodled it out that if the car was moving, or parked at a traffic light, we weren’t there.
The words “When are we gonna be there?”, in full whine mode, passed my lips many times. My dad drove as slow as molasses, loved to take back roads, and stopped for gas every time the tank reached half. 
Half the time my mother would agree with me and bark at him to get on the expressway so we’d get home before midnight.
OP here.
My sister and I didn’t say “Are we there yet?” as kids, for reasons I outlined in the OP, but we did say “Are we in [our grandparents’ city] yet?”
My sisters were horribly prone to carsickness. I tried not to sit next to them, so as not to be given a barf-shower.
StG
Mine asked all the time as well, until I decided to go with the canned answer “Halfway there, 5 more minutes”. Every time they asked. No matter how many times. No matter where we were. Eventually, they gave up and quit asking.
That’s pretty cool.
Did you ask them to pay you not to read?
Oh, yes, both my kids asked.
With my eldest, we learned to give time in “Franklins”, as in, the television show he loved. “About two more Franklins and we’ll be there!” meant we were about an hour away. Mind you, he wasn’t watching Franklin in the car, it just gave him a time reference he could grok, unlike those weird “minute” things that are super fast if you’re on the playground and sooooo slooooow when you’re waiting for dinner.
The younger one really doesn’t care how long it will take, it’s too long. So she gets more smart ass answers, like, “If we were there yet, the car would be parked.” She also gets books and electronic games to keep her occupied and out of our ears.
Yes, my kids ask it all the time. We’ll be taking a 2-hour drive, and they’ll ask when we’re 5 minutes from the house. I just say yes every time now.
When Dan and I were very young, I was 5 and he was 7 my parents drove us overnight - they turned the backseat into 2 beds by making a platform using the transmission hump as the center and built up the foot wells with stuff and laid a couple boards and a sleeping blanket on it for my brother, and I slept on the bench seat [those wonderful old land yachts, Chryslers were great for road trips!] so the 2 of us slept almost all the way to the house in Canada. When we got older, we shifted to day travel and my Mom brought snacks an lunch, and we had a snack at the 1/4 and 3/4 points, and lunch at the half way point. worked out nicely. We also learned the old 1 hour per 50 miles the AAA used to recommend for figuring driving time.
I must have been the odd kid, then and ever since.
I don’t remember ever saying this, or anything similar. We used to vacation at Big Bear, a mountain resort area about 3 hours drive from the San Fernando Valley. (We always took the “back route”, through the Mojave Desert, Palmdale, Victorville, Lucerne Valley.) For me, the trip itself was always part of the adventure.
We always made several stops along the way, usually at certain public parks. Also, there was a little roadside shack near Palmdale that sold all-you-can-drink pink lemonade in a huge cup for 25 cents. Sometimes we just stopped in the middle-of-nowhere in the desert, especially in the spring when there are lots of wildflowers (yes, even in the desert) and the Joshua trees are in bloom.
(There’s also a glider port near Pearblossom, a little ways off on a side road, but I never knew of that until many years later.)
On the way back, one popular stop was a little park in the hills on the old-old Route 14, near what is now Canyon Country, where there were picnic tables and hills that I could hike up.
Thereafter, for my entire adult life, I always enjoyed going for long drives, just for the drive and the scenery, and for whatever interesting places I might find to stop and poke around. There was never any question about being “nearly there” yet. The whole length of the trip was “there”.
After a discussion with my wife a few days ago, I realized what a good job my parents did keeping my brothers and me occupied and engaged during road trips. Some of it seems cheezy today, but between counting cows, looking for the next letter on signs, twenty questions, tapes of old-time radio, and Mad Libs, we never felt the compulsion to ask if we were there yet.
In contrast, my mother-in-law said it was a nightmare with her three daughters until the GameBoy came out. Then they were able to, once, drive to from the Bat Area to Disneyland without the two younger ones noticing (they thought they were going to Tahoe, and somehow didn’t notice the lack of trees and windy, two-lane roads :dubious: ).
My family would use things like “maps” to find out if we were there yet, although that backfired with my then-young little brother. My mom failed to explain what map scalees were when our destination went from an inch away on a statewide map to six inches away on a city detail map. Much crying ensued.