I’ve heard the legends of having to drive to literally everywhere (e.g. drive thru banks), but I have no clue how far apart things are.
I live in suburban London where you can get to a big supermarket in 10 minutes of walking, a train station in 20 minutes and convenience stores are everywhere. You can get anywhere with bus and train in a few hours.
Can someone help a clueless British lemmyposter know how far things are in the US?
EDIT
Here are my walking distances:
- To the nearest convenience store: 250m
- To the nearest chain supermarket: 350m
- To the bus stop: 310m
- To the nearest park: 400m
- To the nearest big supermarket: 1.3km
- To the nearest library: 1.2km
- To the nearest train station: 1km
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: 16km
At this point I just want Japan to realize that not every American lives in walking distance of Los Angeles and NYC, and none of us live in walking distance of both at once.
Seriously, stop basing your marketing strategies around “Major US Cities Only!”
The nearest “Major US” City to me is like a day’s drive, and I mean literally you don’t stop driving for an entire day.
I don’t know. I do kinda enjoy the tourist conversation on the Cannon Ball run.
You can get to New York from LA in 24 hrs, you just have to break a ton of laws.
I’ve found it’s the best way to really drive home how good the Interstate is while also permanently embedding the real size of the continent.
I live in the residential area within the limits of a large US city.
To the nearest convenience store: 0.9 km To the nearest chain supermarket: 2.6 km To the bus stop: 0.3 km To the nearest park: 0.8 km To the nearest big supermarket: 3.1 km To the nearest library: 2.7 km To the nearest train station: 2.9 kmAnd I’d argue that these numbers are remarkably good for people in my situation as well.
I’ll just use the same criteria you gave as an example.
- To the nearest convenience store: 1.5mi (2.6km)
- To the nearest chain supermarket: 1.8mi (2.9km)
- To the bus stop: 0.5mi (800m)
- To the nearest park: 0.3mi (480m) - I’m lucky to have several parks in my neighborhood
- To the nearest big supermarket: 2.1mi (3.4km)
- To the nearest library: 2.2mi (3.5km)
- To the nearest train station: 5.1mi (8.2km)
Edit: I live in a mid-size city (300k) on the east coast.
It’s not necessarily how far things are, it’s that you need a car to get to places in a sensible way.
I’m a fellow Brit, but have stayed in suburban US enough to have experienced how different it is. You might have a supermarket a couple of miles away, but if you want to attempt to walk there, you’ll often be going well out of your way trying to find safe crossing points or even roads with paved sidewalks.
Train stations are mostly used for cargo in most US cities. If you don’t have a car, you’re pretty much screwed.
Some cities are different. NYC being the obvious one. You can get about there by public transport pretty easily in most places there. San Francisco is another city that is more doable without a car, but more difficult than NYC.
I stayed near Orlando not too long ago and there it’s just endless surburban housing with shops and malls dotted about mostly along the sides of main roads. You definitely need a car there.
Denver isn’t great with public transport either. There’s at least a minimal light rail system and buses go pretty much everywhere, so that’s the good part, but the city is so sprawled out that unless your destination is a direct route you’re looking at an hour or more to exclusively use public transport. And that’s really the main city. Start getting out into the expanded metro area and there’s not many choices except for a handful of spur rail or bus lines.
It’s a lot more than many American cities, especially on paper, but in practice it’s pretty rough to use as a primary transport.
Most bus systems in American cities are for people to get to work and back home. Trying to take it to, for instance, a friend’s house, and you’re generally going to spend about 4x the time it’d take to drive there.
This is central Florida, on the east coast. The chain supermarket is Publix, the big supermarket is Walmart. Brightline is supposed to build a train station nearby, but they haven’t started yet.
To the nearest convenience store: 1.9 km To the nearest chain supermarket: 5.7 km To the bus stop: 3.8 km To the nearest park: 1.1 km To the nearest big supermarket: 12.1 km To the nearest library: 7.3 km To the nearest train station: 75.5 kmStraight-line distance to Big Ben: 6,967 km
Many Americans still live in what I’d call “15 minute cities” if we consider it as driving instead of walking.
I live in DFW, a large amalgamation of two cities and a bunch if suburban sprawl in Texas.
I live in a neighborhood that is considered extremely walkable, as I am directly across the street from a university and less than a mile from city hall.Here are my walking distances:
- To the nearest convenience store: 1.8km
- To the nearest chain supermarket: 4.3 km (They have a monopoly though, so unless you can afford whole foods, the closest good one is like 22.5 km)
- To the bus stop: Lol, we don’t have busses. A neighboring city does, so I guess 29 km?
- To the nearest park: Nearest park is 2.8km. Nearest public space is only 1.5km because I live right next to city hall.
- To the nearest big supermarket: 8.9 km to Walmart.
- To the nearest library: 1.5km, again, I live right next to city hall.
- To the nearest train station: 16km, unless you mean one for intercity travel. We don’t have one of those because Amtrak is slowly being killed.
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: we don’t have a Big Ben, but we killed JFK and that’s 34km away.
Bonus fun fact, I commute 42km each day. This is considered far by most people here, 32km would be much more reasonable.
Here are my walking distances in Seattle:
- Convenience store: 150m
- Chain supermarket: 30m
- Big supermarket: 1.6km
- Bus stop: 10m
- Park: 100m
- Library: 150m
- Train station: 2km
Straight-line distance to Space Needle: 4.3km
Great question. London is amazing for being able to walk around, and has amazing transit. I honestly love your city, and may move there someday for it. This is mostly because London embraced transit in the early 20th century.
America went the other way, and embraced the car, and that pushed for the “American Dream”. Suburbs became the normal, where people wanted an independent house farther away from the city. From there bred new problems, people needed to be able to drive their car there, which meant we needed more parking, which meant that things became further and further away.
You can actually blame parking for most of America’s sprawl. Parking eats up a ton of space, and requires large roads to get people where they need to go and then massive parking lots for people to park their cars. Parking lots you can’t even understand in your London mind. Then there are new problems - the parking lots are so massive that now you can’t even walk to the building next door because it’s half a mile just to walk to that place! So people get in their cars to drive across the street to park in the next place. This isn’t exaggerated, that’s just how it is. Take a look at this shopping center in Des Moines, a city where I grew up.
Americans designed cities for cars, not people. There is no way that areas like that were built for humans to move around in, it was built for people to drive to. Greenspace or walkways are not a thing, you are meant to park, walk for hundreds of meters to the front of the door, shop, and then get back in your car and drive across the big street to go to dinner. (To boot, most places won’t let you leave your car either, if you’re done shopping you need to move it).
The real problem is that this is all by design. We kill so much space in our cities so that drivers feel more comfortable. Honestly, I really appreciate London and how well they’ve done. Remember all of this next time your PM wants to “make it easier for drivers”. No. Fuck the drivers. They’re driving their huge metal car into your city, and wanting to have it take up space all so they don’t have to walk or take a train/bus. They should have to pay extra for renting space from the city.
Amazing video on why parking is so freaking stupid in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8
I love how London made most residential roads 20mph so I can bike without feeling like I’m about to be crashed into at any second
I just tried to bike for the first time in my neighborhood. For half of the road there was a bike lane, and it was a ton of fun! Then that section ended and I had to merge with traffic - where I had cars swerving around me and making me feel like I somehow inconvenienced them.
The average American thinks that if roads are too dangerous for bikers, then bikers shouldn’t be allowed to drive on them. This is preferable to reducing the speed limit…that people will ignore anyway.
That was an interesting read. Are you aware of any cities or towns which are built in a more European style with pedestrians in mind? I’m actually considering a few jobs in the states right now but I’m quite put off by how car reliant everything is.
Oh man, those are the hard questions. The short answer - no. You’re not going to find anything in the US even remotely close. What you’re going to want to look for is transit usage. How often and easily do people take transit? Here’s a helpful map for you to see how people get to work.
There is one and only one city that I could consider “close” to European cities in terms of being able to be as pedestrian as Europe, and that’s New York. There are others that are close and have decent transit. Chicago has the CTA and is relatively good if you live near the city center. Philly I hear has decent transit, again try to live near a stop rather than the suburbs. I’m in Seattle, and our transit system is growing rapidly - but most trips still require a car. We’re looking at going from a 2 car household down to a 1 car - but the system has to expand. (Even then it’s only 2 light rail lines and then bus).
Here’s a good video for you on Houston from NotJustBikes on Houston, and what it’s like to live there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54
Boston and New York are probably the closest to European cities with respect to transit that you will find in the States. Plenty of people live in those cities without cars. I lived in Boston for a long time (now in the Boston suburbs) and plenty of adults I know there haven’t even bothered getting their driver’s license.
The other Northeast Corridor cities are probably the next tier down. DC has decent transit if you make live and work near transit stops. Philadelphia can work, but SEPTA has been unreliable at best in my personal experience. I haven’t really spent much time in Baltimore to be able to say.
Outside of the Northeast Corridor, the only other option really would be the San Francisco bay area with its BART system. It has decent coverage and I have family that lives in the area and enjoys it. However, I don’t have much firsthand experience with it.
I think there is one thing backwards here, the US didnt embrace the car which lead to suburbs, but embraced suburbs which lead to using cars. The decision (which really wasnt a conscious one, more just the way it worked out) is based entirely on the vast geography of the country. We have the extra space, so we used it, and needeing cars followed.
The older cities in the US that were built based on European standards all have fairly excellent public networks (NYC, Boston, Philly, etc)
I don’t know who did it, but there was a list of cities in the US with the amount of space used for car parking. I think Tulsa, OK was something like 2/3rds of their downtown land was devoted to parking.
It’s one of those things that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It takes up so much space - and our downtowns are our most precious land that we have as a society. It’s where everyone wants to get to, it’s where we want businesses to open up and things to do, and we park cars on it. I know I come off as very anti-car, and I guess I am in some ways - but european cities have cars. They just don’t use them for 100% of their trips. Heck I drive, but when I go downtown I park at my local park and ride and take the train into the city
Far.
Let’s give it a shot. I live in the suburbs of Lincoln, Nebraska, which is an average-sized college town in the US (about 300k residents):
- Nearest convenience store: 1.1 miles/1.7km (we often do walk there, takes about 20 minutes)
- Nearest chain supermarket/big supermarket (they are often one in the same here): Target @ 1.5 miles/2.4km
- Bus stop: 1.3 miles/2.1km
- Nearest park: 0.6 miles/965m
- Nearest public library: 3.5 miles/5.6km
- Nearest train station: 9.1 miles/14.6km (we don’t really use trains much at all in the US, though)
Let’s start with infrastructure.
Buses/metro/any public transit, barriered or not, sparsely or rarely exist. Even painted bike paths/walking paths, these usually exist ONLY in dense or older urban areas. You have either 1-1.5m wide sidewalk elevated 10cm or nothing separating you on foot from car traffic.
So that 250m is often on the shoulder of car lanes.
Now let’s talk property liability. You are responsible for injuries others sustain while on your property unless you have clearly posted signage expressing they were not allowed on your property. Even then and at best you’ll have to disrupt 6mo of your life tied up in courts+fees. (No right to roam. You do get the “perk” of open manhunting season on trespassers)
So that shortcut through the neighborhood where your neighbor laid out gravel because they care about community? Nope, that’s cyclone fence or cinder block wall. That alley between flats? Gated off.
It’s not even scale that’s the problem. You ALWAYS have to go around the ENTIRE block. A 250m Crow flight can easily be and most often is 1+km by foot, and only ever with a curb as your protection from traffic. You can’t safely get to geographically nearby places without putting yourself in mortal danger.
Also note European road design limits traffic in residential areas where the US grid system means every road is a main road and wide enough to promote excessive speeding.
Source: anecdotal/American living in EU
To be fair, you live in a large city. Cities here in the states also have many points of interest close by. In the suburbs, places are more spread out, same as they would be in the UK. It’s all about location.
I live in a town of 220,000 in the UK.
I’m a 5 minute walk from a small supermarket.
10 mins from a corner shop.
5 minute drive from a huge supermarket.
10 minute walk from a doctors’ surgery.
20 minute walk from a dentist’s.
20 minute walk from an opticians.
5 minute walk from a park.
15 minutes walk from primary and 10 minutes walk from a secondary school.
But we don’t really do suburbs in quite the same way, and they’re much more walkable than the pictures I’ve seen of US suburbia.
Walking distance is only part of this equation.
We have no sidewalks and I would need to cross a 6 lane interstate if I were to go to the “closest” anything.
My work commute is minimum 40 minutes one way by car. Probably 2.5 hours by bus, with probably 20 minutes of walking, in Texas heat and humidity.
