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
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.
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
In the suburbs of a middle-sized city in Ohio, USA. So midwest, but a bit older, higher-density, and more northeastern suburban layout than, say, Iowa. Built up in the 1960s-70s. Almost all single-family suburban homes on large lots.
(these are walking distances, not straight lines)
- To the nearest convenience store: 1.6 km
- To the nearest chain supermarket: 4.2 km
- To the bus stop: 1.5 km
- To the nearest park: 226 meters
- To the nearest big supermarket: 2.1 km
- To the nearest library: 2.6 km
- To the nearest train station: Hahaha! (Ok, it’s actually 78 km, but it’s mostly worthless as a train station)
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: 6297 km
I live in a walkable neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. I have grocery stores in walking distance but usually drive to nicer ones for big hauls. I drive to the gym. I could bike there but there’s no bike lanes and steep hills. Everything else on your list is just a few blocks away.
Everything around me is a 30 minute drive… except the mailbox, that’s just a 5 minute walk.
I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. My neighborhood isn’t the best for walkability – there are definitely better areas in this city in that respect.
To the nearest convenience store: 1.5km To the nearest chain supermarket: 1.9km To the bus stop: 140m To the nearest park: 480m To the nearest big supermarket: 5.8km To the nearest library: 1.9km To the nearest train station: 800m
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: 6450km
In a suburb of Boston, my distances would be very similar to OP, except the bus stop is much closer and I don’t have that nearby chain grocery.
But my brothers are all about 10h drive (my visit this summer was over 1,200 miles round trip) and my mom is 14h drive
Off topic, but after I moved halfway across the US, I wondered what that same distance would be driving across Europe.
I moved from the NW corner of Washington state to about the middle of Iowa, roughly 2000 miles or 3200 Km (roughly, I said)
Its looks to be the same as going from Lisbon to roughly halfway in between Berlin and Warsaw, using google maps to follow roadways.
I can’t imagine all of the different cultures you would see traveling most of the way through Europe, and most of what I saw on my trip through the States was empty dead grass fields, farmland, a couple dead deer, and a ton of truckers.
250 m to the nearest mini market
400 to the nearest mini mall
1k to the railroad station
400 to the park
150 to the (unreliable) bus stop
I live in rural Oklahoma…
Here are my walking distances: * To the nearest convenience store: 4.667km * To the nearest chain supermarket: 24.140km * To the bus stop: 27.358km * To the nearest park: 321.869m * To the nearest *big* supermarket: 33.7962km * To the nearest library: 32.1869km * To the nearest train station: 70.8111km
+4600km to the nearest store is like, lots of walking, maybe more than 1h walk. I sad
Yeah, it’s an hour walk one way to that store…
Where I live owning a car is a requirement :(
I’m also in rural Oklahoma and it is about 9200m for me to get to the closest store, a Dollar General. So I don’t walk, but I do get to live in a beautiful forest next to a lake and stream.
Rural southern Georgia: 300m to the only gas station/convenience store in town. 10km to the nearest real supermarket, medical center, pharmacy, tiny library, dentist, and a couple of restaurants. 30km to the nearest big box store (Walmart). 100km to the nearest small regional airport. 120km to train station.
I live in Atlanta, in an intown neighborhood that was once considered a “streetcar suburb” although the streetcars have been gone for decades. For a neighborhood with single-family houses, this is about as good as it gets in terms of urbanism and walkability. (Basically, to do much better you’d have to live in a high-rise in Downtown or Midtown because we don’t really have medium-density neighborhoods.)
Point is, my area is not representative of Metro Atlanta as a whole. Probably 90%+ of the metro area population would report distances at least double, if not an order of magnitude larger.
Walking distances:
- To the nearest gas station (“convenience store”): 0.7 miles (1.1 km)
- To the nearest chain supermarket: 1.2 miles (1.9 km)
- To the bus stop: 0.2 miles (320 m)
- To the nearest park: 0.9 miles (1.4 km)
- To the nearest big supermarket: 1.5 miles (2.4 km)
- To the nearest library: 0.7 miles (1.1 km)
- To the nearest MARTA station (“train station”): 1.9 miles (3 km) [Amtrak would be considerably further]
Straight-line distance to Capitol Building: about 3 miles (5 km).
I live in a VERY rural area. If I want to visit my neighbors, it’s at the very least a 10 minute walk. To buy groceries it’s about a 20 mi drive. If I want to go to a movie theater, it’s a 40 mile drive. It’s about a 70 mile drive to the closest city (sky scrapers and stuff)
There’s no public transportation or even sidewalks. The closest town that is 5 miles away has one stoplight and a population of 700 ish. We do have a few restaurants in town though, a school and a post office.
Reading your description of the place you live in just reminds me how incredible different people live their lives. Such different lifestyles. I can’t even comprehend living in such a remote place. It’s no wonder that people are divided in almost every way.
To give some comparison, here are my distances. Important to note that I intentionally moved somewhere in my town with walkability in mind.
To the nearest convenience store: 280m
To the nearest chain supermarket: 1.7km
To the bus stop: 260m
To the nearest park: 240m
To the nearest big supermarket: 2.4km
To the nearest library: 1.2km
To the nearest train station: 85kmAccess to a bus stop doesn’t really matter either as it usually is faster to walk than to wait for the bus to arrive, unless it is long distance in which I would just drive.
Distances seem about the same in my small US town.
No train.
Little further to Big Ben, i think.
