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 can probably offer some insight, as my in-laws live in Wimbledon, some of my family live both near and far from DC/Baltimore, and I live in the Netherlands.
My London experience is on par to yours. Everything is walking distance and the things that aren’t are accessible by public transit fairly easily.
The Netherlands imo is even better planned and connected than the UK. The convenience store is around the corner from my townhouse. Two large chain supermarkets are just a 3 or 7 minute walk depending on which is preferred (the 7-min one is pricier but better selection) and there are more a few more minutes walking. The bus stop is 3 min away, train is a 10 minute walk. Parks and bike lanes all around.
DC is also very walkable and similar to London. Bike lanes. Everything is accessible and public transit is pretty good. Lots of convenience stores, small grocers, and even some larger chains. A few metro lines even go far out to the suburbs. I like the building height limit, which makes the city feel more open. Rock Creek Park is massive and you feel like you’re in the forest.
Once you get to the suburbs there may be a convenience store a 10-20 minute walk away, or a grocer if you’re lucky, but generally this is when you’ll be needing a car, as public transit becomes scant. Many Americans are walking averse; my husband and I are the odd couple that parks at the back of the lot when visiting Costco instead of spending half an hour hoping to get a spot by the doors. Most stores will be in plazas or strip malls.
My father lives out in the country. He loves having acres and acres of no one around. His house is an island. There’s one 7-11 in his tiny village. He’s lucky it’s a 5 minute walk from his house. If I want to get groceries when visiting, the nearest store is 8 miles away (a leisurely 4 hour walk; 10 minute drive). Oftentimes there are no sidewalks; mostly long stretches of road with big shoulders. I don’t think there’s public transit there; I’ve never seen a bus. There are farms everywhere so parks need to be driven to, however, they are pretty big with lots of room for activities.
It’s likely not too different from comparing London to Dartmoor. Much of it depends on where you are (population density). Some areas have great public transit and access to services, others don’t.
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
Depends.
If you live in a very rural area it can be more than an hour by car to some of these things, 50 miles or more, other items may not exist at all like public transportation. Inter-city public transportation is all but imposable for smaller locations, difficult and lengthy the greater the distance and size differential in locations.
I used to live in a metro area. Everything was within 10 minutes walk except medical care, but walking to the subway would get you to top tier medical facilities in about 15-20 minutes. Getting to nearby “bedroom” communities was also pretty easy thanks to a commuter rail.
I now live in a suburban area that has OK bus service but it’s not very convenient to where I live at all. Everything is within a 10 minute drive, and unfortunately a car is necessary due to the lack of sidewalks in many places. It does have light rail to a major metro area, about two hour’s ride, and then you can access the metro area major transportation network to all nearby areas and further away. Probably about as good as it gets in the US.
Nearest store of any kind - 1 mile
Full serve store - same
Library - .75 mile
Bus stop - 1.2 miles
Small park - .5 miles
Large park - 3 miles
Access to light rail - 4 miles
Knock off this “public transportation is only for big cities” propaganda bullshit. The US literally had a comprehensive rail network. The town of 1000 I used to live in had a train that connected to anywhere in the nation in the 1930s.
I really don’t know what you’re on about. I stated what we have today. Period. My comment has nothing to do with “propaganda” or rail history in the US. Did you even reply to the right comment?
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.
To reiterate how bad public transit is, even in populated areas: I’m also in DFW. This is my daily commute…
It’s ~9.6km. Note that the bus/train option is entirely greyed out, because there is no public transit which runs from my house to my job. If I were to walk, the only option would be on the side of a highway. I would have cars passing me at ~70 MPH without even a curb for protection.
To walk to the nearest grocery store, it’s ~4km, with a large part of it along the shoulder of that same highway. Same with a major chain.
Nearest bus stop is ~6.9km, but that only takes me in a direction I wouldn’t need to go; There are no local bus or train stops that land me near where I work or live.
I’m in the Indianapolis area, and we do have public transit… though I don’t know why.
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 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
Everything around me is a 30 minute drive… except the mailbox, that’s just a 5 minute walk.
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.
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.
We once driven through three countries (France, Belgium, back through France, onto a ferry and to England) in one day. Each has a different language.
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 moved to Belgium recently, and after 2 months, here i am, buying my first car. Suburbs suck on every contient
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.
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 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.
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).
