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
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.
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.
This is a map of the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) area in Texas. Yes, we know it looks like a penis. I live near the blue dots at the top right. My husband works near the red heart at the bottom left. That’s about 45 miles and takes an hour most days because both are near highways. Public transit says over 4 hours with three bus/train changes and has a 15 minute walk at each end. Not great when it’s 100F outside.
In many other cities, if you drive 10 miles out of downtown, you can be in the countryside. We can drive 50 miles and be in suburban areas with traffic the entire time. Most people here have a grocery store within 3-4 miles. There are less groceries as you go closer to downtown or in older or cheaper/poorer areas. Convenience stores are closer, but they’re usually gas stations and are pretty expensive for food items. We have several decent restaurants within 5 or 10 miles, but it’s not unusual to drive 20+ miles to go to a favorite restaurant or store or to meet a friend who lives in a different area of town.
In Europe, you can drive for five hours and cross through five cities in three countires. In the US, you can drive five hours and still be in LA.
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.
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 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.
You have “a few” restaurants in a town of 700? That’s crazy. I’m also rural, but I have to drive past 2 towns of that size to get to the town of ~3000 just to see a restaurant.
This largely depends on where you are in the US. I have moved a lot over the years, from dense city centers, to the dirt roads of rural America. Here are my experiences:
NYC would probably be the most comparable to your experience in London, but seeing as I haven’t lived there, I can instead talk about Boston. When I lived inside the subway range in Boston (Somerville specifically), my experience matches up with yours. I was ~5 minutes from a supermarket and ~15 minutes from the subway/train stop by foot. I was even closer to a couple bus stops for lines that would take me to places like a mall, nearby universities, or the next subway line over (we don’t have an equivalent of the Circle line).
I currently live in Boston suburbs (Metrowest for people that know the area) and can’t really walk anywhere as my street and adjacent streets don’t have sidewalks. I could try to walk on the street, but with the narrowness combined with the speed at which people drive through this neighborhood, it would not be fun. If I hop in the car, I am ~5 minutes from a strip mall with a supermarket, pharmacy, liquor store, etc. and ~10 minutes from the commuter rail train station that I use to commute to the city for work. If I want to head to a large shopping hub with a mall, then it is ~20 minutes away by car. There is a skeleton of a bus system in my area, but it would require traversing ~1.5 miles on streets without sidewalks to get to the nearest stop for me.
When I lived in a rural area (rural PA), things were very different. To get to the nearest supermarket (a WalMart), it took ~30 minutes worth of driving. If I wanted to go to the mall, it was closer to 60 minutes. I am sure there are even less dense areas than that in this country.
Canadian here but this is pretty much the sentiment I wanted to add. If I was answering for the last city I lived in (400k ish, moderate city for here) it would be a very different answer (<30 minute walk generally anywhere in the “metro” area) than for where I live now (rural, 15 minute drive for grocery in three possible directions, pass at least three cannabis dispensaries on the way to any of them and two liquor stores. Public transit is available but is quasi-regional transit too). So grocery is at 15 minutes, and like in your case a mall is an hour, as is a major market like a Walmart, mega grocer thing, Costco…
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.
My closest superstore an hour drive away. 60 miles. The closest grocer is 12 miles. My closest international airport is 1.5 hours away. It is also the closest regional airport. 85 miles. The closest national park is 3 hours. I live 6 miles from my closest town.
There are no passenger trains, busses, or taxis. Or uber.
Rural america is empty. And spread out. We get along fine, but public transit will never exist here. Cars are the only way.
Yep. I live the same life in a very rural and somewhat remote area also. Population density is very low making modern conveniences non-existent and not ever likely to exist in such places.
Other things to consider: Kids often ride a school bus for an hour or more to and from school. Nearest hospital is 40 miles away. And it’s a Level 3. This means it’s pretty much a bandaid station. I used to work as a medic up here. The number of times I had to literally turn the lights on in the ER and wait for the doctor to get out of bed and drive to the hospital would shock you. Nearest ambulance is 20 miles away and you better hope they aren’t already busy when you dial 911. Because if they are, it could be several hours before they can get to you. The US Postal Service will NOT deliver mail to my home. I need to pay $160 a year for a post office box, (no free delivery for me!), and drive the 12 mile round trip to town, (Pop: 150), just to get my mail.
Your measurements are almost exactly mine, down to the closest town.
The railway used to be the default for rural areas. It could be again.
So how does rail solve the Last Mile problem? It does no good to say “take the train” if the nearest train station is 60 miles away. And is it the best use of a train to run tracks to a town/village with a population 150 people or less?
Light rail and buses? Even the most remote rural towns in Japan have small shuttle buses that serve even the sparsest areas. The great thing about public transit is that it is actually scalable if there’s political will to make it happen. A shuttle bus can connect a rural neighborhood to a big train station within 60 minutes. The cool factor of transit is mix and matching several types of transport to cover the most area with the highest mobility for the widest array of people.
Japan still has a higher density of population and far less landmass to cover. My nearest neighbor is over a mile away. Are you going to build a bus route or light rail just for me? Or through county, state, and federal forest lands? Logistics is a bitch.
Only where the rails went. We’d have to replace all the roads with light rails.
It would take more than that. The problem is almost not solvable under present economic and political conditions.
Oh, I agree. There are wide swaths of the country that rail cannot service. Individual homes out in the sticks, farmland, etc. they’d need a car or truck just to get to the train station.
Not for last mile, but should be a much larger part of the picture.
So first of all, the US is big and diverse, if you hop in a car and drive from New York to LA without stopping, taking the fastest route, mostly on major highways, averaging out to something like 60+mph (about 100 km/h) you’re still going to be spending just about 2 days in the car.
And in between, you’re going to see a little bit of everything, mountain, plains, forest, farms, huge dense urban cities, towns small enough you can barely even call them a town, suburban sprawl, massive industrial facilities, you name it you’re going to see it.
Overall, if you live in an urban area, the situation may not be too bad, cities are somewhat walkable, there’s public transportation that will usually get you fairly close to where you need to go, there may even be protected bike lanes, etc. although the situation will vary wildly from one city to another.
It will even vary from one part of the city to another. You can have large sections of the city where there’s no real grocery stores or other places to get your basic necessities, and you’re pretty much limited to whatever you can get from corner stores, bodegas, convenience stores, etc. (mostly pre-packaged and processed foods, and if you’re lucky maybe a couple pieces of fresh fruit) and if you want anything more than that you’re probably looking at taking a few hours out of your day to walk a significant distance to a store or take public transit that may not go exactly where you need it, may be slow, expensive, or just a pain in the ass to deal with, etc.
Getting out into the suburbs, it’s again kind of a crapshoot. There are some walkable suburbs, with wonderful shopping options, there’s some that are a maze of residential developments and gated communities that come off of major roads with no sidewalks or even shoulders worth speaking of and you’re taking a significant gamble trying to walk anywhere from there. There may be little or no public transportation and if there is it may not be going anywhere you need to go, or be convenient to get onto
Personally, I live towards the rural end of the suburbs, about an hour or less from a major city depending on traffic.
Damn near everything I could ever want or need is within about a half hour drive, and most of I commonly need is covered within about 15 minutes.
If I don’t have a car though, my options drop off significantly. I’m looking at an hour walk one way to get to a grocery store, mostly along a long winding road with little or no shoulder and few streetlights. The only things I would really feel safe to walk to are 2 pizza shops, a small hardware store, a bar, a CVS, and gas station/convenience store, those last 2 are going to be about a half hour or longer walk, and along that winding road, but it’s a stretch that at least has a half decent shoulder and some lawns to walk on for most of the way.
If you have a bike, there’s a decent bike trail that will get you to some more shopping options, but it’s about an hour’s ride one way.
If you need to catch public transit, you’d have to walk about 2 hours to catch a bus, that line basically runs straight up and down a main road between the city and a larger, urban-ish town further out in the suburbs. There’s not many options to transfer to anywhere else along the way but there’s a lot along that route so if you can get to that bus most of your needs will be covered, but it doesn’t run super frequently and it’s not going to get you anywhere in a hurry.
Getting out into rural America, you have some small towns that are functionally self-contained, with their own grocery stores and other shopping options in-town within walking distance. Your options are limited but for the most part everything you really need is right there in town.
If you don’t work in town though, and often people in these areas don’t, they may be involved in farming, logging, oil/natural gas, construction, etc. and may work many miles from town, you’re pretty much screwed if you don’t have a car, or at least can count on carpooling with a coworker.
There’s other small towns where there just isn’t much of anything at all, maybe they have a gas station and a liquor store, and if you need anything else you’re SOL, in some cases you may be looking at an hour or more drive to get to anything else so you can forget about walking.
Regardless of where/what kind of area you find yourself in, transportation between cities is often going to be an issue. You can probably catch a Greyhound bus or maybe Amtrak or similar between most major cities, though you may have to get a little creative with figuring out your route, but if you’re trying to get to the smaller towns in between you may not have much luck.
There are, of course, nearly as many exceptions and special cases to everything I said as there are individual towns and cities.
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.
I live on the edge of a small town. Google numbers:
- To the nearest convenience store: 4.7km, 1hr 4min walk
- To the nearest chain supermarket: 21km, 4hr 38min walk
- To the nearest bus stop: 18km, 4hr 7min walk
- To the nearest park: 3.4km, 47 minute walk
- To the nearest library: 4.7km, 1hr 3min walk
- To the nearest train station: 20km, 4hr 31 minute walk
At my current job, I’m about 45 minutes away by car. Car is also the only option. Before I moved closer, I was actually an hour and a half away, so 90 minutes one way, or 3 hours per day worth of driving.
It’s too expensive to live in the cities themselves, so I have to live further out and just commute.
Closest wal-mart is about 30 minutes away, but there’s smaller stores closer if I dont’t need much.
I haven’t mentioned walking/biking because there’s no point in walking where I live. There’s next to no shoulder on the road, and it’s 45MPH (72KPH) roads with mostly large pickup trucks driving on it, so it’s not safe to walk.
For reference, I live in the American south, so it’s somewhat rural.
The big thing to know is that things spread out as you go from East to West.
On the East Coast, New England area, everything is pretty tightly packed. On the West Coast? Not so much.
When I was living in Eugene, Oregon, I had family visit from Sweden, so we asked them what they wanted to do.
“We want to go to Disneyland!”
OK, not saying we CAN’T, but it’s 13 hours in the car assuming no traffic.
I want to add that in many places in the US it is not just the distance, but the danger and outright discouragement of walking somewhere. For example, I contemplated using a train to get to Lego Land in California from Oceanside, California. After getting off of the train I would have to walk 1.3 miles, which is only a minor inconvenience. However, after reviewing the walking route google has this qualifier: “Use caution - may involve errors or sections not suited for walking”. This prompted me to review the walk using street view and I came to the conclusion that there was not a safe route.
This is just one example of something that I think should specifically be available. There are many places where walking is encouraged and convenient, but it is by no means universal.
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.
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