I'd love to be able to ask, say, where I can find a good shop in New Jersey to fit a stem on my touring bike, but that's what traditional forums are for, and Stack Exchange isn't trying to replace those. Also, when one of the four hard-coded reasons for closing a question is that a question is "too localized", then it makes it easy to justify closing a question.
It's getting fairly obvious that the users here want to be able to ask these questions. However, I think we need to draw a line. We've already decided that routes are off-topic, sorta. (Generalizations about route planning are okay, if I follow the top-voted answer to this question.) It would follow that generalizations about country-specific issues would be fine, but I'm not sure what form that would take.
Allowing just "Canada" or "US" or "England" questions is one thing -- these countries are large enough that plenty of users will find them, well, useful -- but what about smaller English-speaking countries? What about India, where English is commonly spoken? I'm worried that we'll end up having to judge which countries are allowed and which aren't, which feels wrong to me. So I would prefer to disallow them, unless we can come up with a clear framework for such questions.