To Americans: How far apart is everything in the US?
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.
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.
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.
London (like much of Western Europe) was heavily demolished during WWII, so had to rebuild.
While during the same period the US was the opposite - it had an explosion of manufacturing growth during WWII, and having it dispersed made sense in numerous ways - it's where the population was, or where space was available to easily expand, or where certain resources were, or even was far enough away from population for safety reasons (see uranium enrichment at Rocky Flats northwest of Denver, which is now largely an open space because you simply can't reclaim that soil with all the uranium dust buried in it). You can see this in many cities where the old industrial areas are being reclaimed and converted to housing, shopping, entertainment, etc.
So you have 19th century engineering used during massive manufacturing growth ((because it was established and many older engineers (beyond draft age) had years of experience with it) in the US, while Europe saw destruction of lots of 19th century (and earlier) development.
Rebuilding happened during the mid-20th. So why wouldn't you use the newest engineering.
In the US I once worked at a company manufacturing leather belts for factories that still had drive shafts running equipment. They were also using lathes from WWII, because it was precise enough for the assembly line machinery which was similar in age. Upgrading would cost more than it was worth (this was in the early 2000's). I suspect their entire plant was built during WWII.
One way to look at it - in land space, the US is equivalent to 16 western OECD countries. Comparing a single European country to the US is meaningless. Better to compare most of the EU, and even then historical events, and political borders make for very different results.
Sure, there are a dozen reasons for why we went one route and they went another. I'm not declaring "why" it happened, but these things happened differently in each country, stirring in a few other nicely added oil and gas collusion (like buying up US transit and tearing it up to make more room for cars and throwing in some fearmongering causing white flight out of cities to suburbs) and we get where we are.
We had more space, but in terms of cities it's the same thing. Other people are comparing the space in terms of country size. I'm talking about space in terms of city size and shape. London rebuilt during that time, during that time our cities were growing. Both were building for different reasons, and we both chose radically different approaches.
Just because we have more space doesn't mean that we use it well - or that we even needed to. Our cities sprawl because of stupid politics like minimum parking. London could continue sprawling, Paris could, many many cities could. Our politics actively encouraged it, and now we have giant ugly sprawling 1 story garbage everywhere.
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
I never knew Boston was designed for cars (yes, that's sarcasm, Boston is known for its roads being enlarged footpaths dating back hundreds of years, some of which started as paths that animals took).
The US is much more complex than such a simple statement. US cities, historically, weren't so much designed as grew. And I still see that today. My town, a suburb of a city, was established about 1860 (140 years ago), when there was empty space between it and the city - farmland.
It certainly wasn't "designed for cars" that didn't exist at the time. The town I grew up in existed before cars.
And I've seen this all over the place. The cities grow until they run into small towns, which then become suburbs of the city. These small towns were often agriculture based (or manufacturing based), because farms need to take their cop to the train, the train stop ends up growing a town.
The only "designed" city I can think of is one in Maryland. There are others, but cities aren't "designed" - that implies an over-arching plan. Cities are organic, they grow.
If you want to make a "design" argument, Western Europe is much more in line with this idea, since so much infrastructure was destroyed by two successive world wars over 20 years, and the reconstruction with "modern" engineering and design that took place starting in the 1950's.
I was going to say if it was built before 1950 then it was probably better, but even then most cities were in fact radically changed and altered by the car. Even Boston was radically changed, bulldozing entire neighborhoods just so they could build the interstates through. (Those neighborhoods were mostly minorities of course, even in Boston if you look up where they decided was the "best" locations for the interstates guess whose neighborhoods were affected) - and even then those car-centric design decisions are still reverberating today. Look at Boston's number one infrastructure project over the last 30 years - The Big Dig. Purely 100% because cars were a focus. Even now it's still designed as a car centric approach because the entire "park" they put up is surrounded by a massive boulevard that you have to cross, surrounded by car noise.
Small towns too were radically altered by the car. Where small towns had hubs near the train station where people would get on now sprawl was not just there - but encouraged. Why live in the center of town when you could go live on the outskirts away from people?
So yes, your argument of "But cities were built before" - yes, many were. That doesn't mean that we didn't destroy huge portions of them just to accommodate drivers.
So I'll amend my statement: Cities were bulldozed and rebuilt for the car.
Good Armchair Urbanist video about The Big Dig and Boston's interstates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5pPKfzzL54
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 understand your meaning but saying that those east coast cities were built to European standards is maybe not the best way to phrase it.
Philly in particular, is a standout for being one of the first planned cities. Not that there weren't attempts at city planning before then, but they tended to be more of an attempt to straighten out the wacky stuff that had grown organically. With Philly most of the city was pretty much laid out from the beginning, which was fairly unique at the time. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to find something totally comparable to that in Europe at the time.
What they do share with European cities though, is that they (relatively) old, and from the era before cars were a thing, so the city planning happened with the assumption that people would be walking pretty much everywhere.
Side note- I remember reading an article about one of the older assassins creed games set in the American revolution, and one of the reasons they decided to not set it in philly was because Philly, even back then, was too orderly of a grid with lots of long straight streets that you can look a long way down and the graphics engine had a hard time rendering that far.
Does America not have places like British retail parks? Where the parking lot is basically shared by all the large shops which are then shoulder to shoulder with each other? Maybe that's what a mall is. Though I was under three impression the shops were constrained for size there.
Maybe close to our strip mall, where q bunch of retail is in a strip of stores. It's slightly better than the image I showed, but I wouldn't call it walkable. You can at least walk to the next store, but you still are surrounded by parking, and usually on a large road, usually on the outskirts of town so you have to drive there. Then if another strip mall is built than that is the same as the picture I showed, where now you have to walk a mile to get across the parking lots, usually down the road several blocks distance to actually find a safe crossing, and then cross another massive parking lot.
We also have malls, which I always laugh at because they're trying to simulate what we don't have - a walkable neighborhood. Everybody loved them because they simulated the small shops and actually walking around, but surrounded again by miles of parking and again usually outside of town, so the only way to get there is driving.
(And if your wondering, transit "exists" in that image, in that there's one bus stop for that whole area on a route that last I checked runs once every two hours during weekdays, ending at 7pm)
The lack of public transport is something I just can't get my head around. Most British towns shopping centres are also transport hubs. People still complain about buses etc but they're somewhat comparing it to London where many routes have 5-10 buses an hour and where any new major shopping areas will be sat on top of a tube or rail station. Britain still has large retail park carparks but you'll almost always find them served by a handful of bus routes. I don't think I'd ever be able to give up the combo of being able to walk 2 mins to the corner shop or hop the bus for ten mins for almost anything else.
Welcome to my primary frustration. It only takes most people to try a real city with real public transit to realize they actually like cities. Cities are fearmongered here in the states, people think they're high crime, they're dirty, they're not easy to get to, and frankly I firmly believe most of that is because of our transit. Cities are hard to get to because most of them require cars to get to. Those with actual fun downtown (that don't have good transit) involve people parking somewhere and walking around. Vegas and San Antonio are great examples.
Having things so distant and making it hard to get into the cities makes people not want to go there, which deteriorates the city core - which then crime becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. By leaving the downtown core and never going - they unintentionally make crime worse.
There's actually a really interesting theory here in the states. People really remember fondly going to college (Uni for you brits ;)), mostly because they always had a group of friends around, they would meet up for meals, go out for drinks, and they were all in the dorms. Then they graduate and most move out to the suburbs. The theory is - do they miss college? Or do they miss having a truly walkable neighborhood, with most things nearby? Friends that they can just see when they're out walking around? A transit system that helps them get around their neighborhood easily.
How we move around fascinates me, and I think it's a huge reason for a lot of social issues we face here in the states. I'll go as far as most of them. I'll take a very extreme example. Our culture's racism would be inherently better with better transit. There's reasons why more urbanized cores are more open to other people and cultures - it's because we're normalized to it. We see people every day and know they're just like us. In suburban and rural america you aren't exposed to other people. Even if you go to work you're alone in your car, you don't experience being around others. Having something like the Tube makes it a natural gathering place, where you experience everyone around you, and a lot of those prejudices can easily fall away just by being around people.
That turned out longer than I thought! Thanks for reading this far if you did :)
There's a neat video I found a while back that almost sums everything up perfectly: The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis
I say "almost," because the one thing it fails to do is take one step backward and realize that the housing crisis is itself caused by single-family zoning and lack of walkable density!
I'll watch today! But yes I think the same thing! We only allow single family homes which means everything is spread out too far, which means there aren't enough homes within a given area... Which means we need both better transit to reach those areas and/or to upzone to denser housing
I've also thought about this. Being on the subway with other people humanizes them in a way being stuck in traffic doesn't. When you have the shared experience of everyone groaning over the "being held in the station by the dispatcher", that makes a difference. It's a lot easier to hate people you never see.
Exactly. I'll admit that growing up in the Midwest I had the fears of the scary boogymen, but I grew up in a town with one black kid in our whole school. Moving to a real city all of that went out the window quick, and transit is a big reason for it. People are just people.
Of course it does! Well, sort of: American strip malls are like British retail parks, but BIGGER. (At least, judging by the pictures of the latter I just looked up.)
In the case of the grandparent commenter's aerial photo, it's sort of like Adam's aura in Good Omens: aside from various kinds of relatively high-density residential in the corners (e.g. assisted living top right and what appear to be townhouses bottom left), pretty much that entire area is retail! There are at least four strip malls on four different blocks -- the one with the Chik-Fil-A, the one with the TJ Maxx, the one with the Wal-Mart, and the one with the Aldi -- and each of the four is probably bigger than a typical British "retail park" by itself.
Suburban America is literally comprised of two things:
Generally speaking, America has a few different kinds of "malls:"
Traditional commercial development -- the sorts of "main street" shops you find in old small towns, if they haven't been killed by Wal-Mart and torn down. (Not generally called a "mall," but included in the list for completeness -- it's important to remember what we've lost.)
"Strip malls" a.k.a. shopping centers -- like I said, "retail parks" but bigger. Also the most common type of American retail.
"Malls" -- indoor shopping centers with large department stores at the ends, connected by hallways with smaller stores along them and surrounded by parking lots.
"Outdoor malls" a.k.a. "lifestyle centers" -- kinda like a cross between a mall and a Disney-esque fake downtown, with groups of shops in separate freestanding buildings connected by outdoor pedestrian paths either similar in layout to an indoor mall, or resembling a city street grid. Typically built pretty far out into the suburbs and surrounded by parking lots. On the bright side, as the newest sort of American retail development, sometimes they're mixed-use.
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)
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...
many parts of rural Alaska, for example have grocery stores less than a mile away from most of their population, but require planes to get to anything larger.
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.
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.
I live on the edge of a small town. Google numbers:
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:
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.
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.
Depends where you live.
In a city? 75% of everything I need is right across the street.
In a rural town? Before I moved to the city, I had to drive 30-45 miles away to do literally anything. There were busses, but they only came around once in the morning and once more in the evening. And they didn't always go where you wanted directly, so you'd have to spend like an entire day just to get to a place.
Nearest big landmark everyone might recognize is the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. And thats 78 miles away in a straight line.
Edit: To put things in terms non-Americans may understand better - We tend to measure distances not in the unit of distance, but in the time it takes to get somewhere. Assuming there is no traffic, the Golden Gate Bridge would only be an hour away taking the freeway. But that's never gonna happen; the traffic through the Altamonte Pass alone is gonna add 1-2 hours depending on the time of day.
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.
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.
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.
I’ll just use the same criteria you gave as an example.
Edit: I live in a mid-size city (300k) on the east coast.
nearly 3km to convenience store or supermarket... in a city? i get the other comments with similar numbers but they said they're in the middle of nowhere, in the suburbs and such.
also i live in such a big city that 300k feels like a small neighborhood.
I was going to call it a “small” city but Google told me that 300k is mid-size so I went with that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The city is ~350 sq km and our tiny downtown area is probably about 1 sq km, so the entire city is kinda like a suburb. Heck, I’m from Houston which is known for its urban sprawl, and yet there’s lower population density where I live now.
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.
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.
On the west coast, it can take 8 (EDITED) hours to drive from the capital of oregon to the capital of california. Likewise, it takes about 14 to 16 to get from oregon to montana. It can take 4 to 6 hours to get from the southern oregon border to the northern.
Where I live, i can walk to a little convenience store in about 10 minutes, but the nearest supermarket would be an hour walk away (10-15 minutes by car). If i were to move 10 miles in any direction, i may not have a convenience store around.
Salem to Sacramento shouldn’t take that long unless there is gnarly traffic. As a kid, my family regularly did San Jose to Seattle in 16 hours.
Salem's not at the northern border. You still have the distance of portland to go, or at least driving around it, and even that can take a while.
From border to border, Organic Maps estimates 5 hours and 20 minutes, which does not include traffic.
I did run the calculation from salem to sacramento though, and i was off by about double. Its 16 hours to southern california (ive done the drive), but to sacramento, its only 8. I own that mistake, I don't travel to california much and mistook the trip I took for the distance i was thinking about.
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
Distance isn't the only factor to consider. The infrastructure is also very important for determining if a short distance is walkable.
This YouTube channel has lots of great info on the topic https://youtube.com/notjustbikes and this video in particular demonstrations that not even all short distances are necessarily walkable in the US https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54 @ 4:30 he begins to show a 800m walk in Houston from his hotel to a store.
I live in suburban Kansas City and these are the distances to the things you mentioned -
The closest publicly accessible business to me is a fast food restaurant about a mile away.
Basically if I need anything, it's a 30 minute walk one way to get there. It just isn't really viable as a regular thing to spend an hour walking to get to/from a convenience store, or 2 hours for a grocery store. Instead, I spend 10-20 minutes in my car for those errands, and save the extra time for walking my dog (since he couldn't go into any of the places mentioned above either, so his walks would have to be in addition anyway.)
OP dweller here!
I will add that indeed these suburbs are designed for driving, even if there are good sidewalks and parks everywhere. Where I am at, everything feels like a 5 to 15 minute drive away. Banks, pharmacies and lots of restaurants have drive-thrus. Major intersections are typically one mile apart on a squared grid. The major stroads are often lined with big stores and restaurants with giant parking lots, while the interior parts of those grid blocks are housing colonies, schools and parks. Different suburbs are connected to each other and the city with arterial highways. And compared to Europe, fuel is very cheap. Cartopia.
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
Everything around me is a 30 minute drive... except the mailbox, that's just a 5 minute walk.
Same. 30 mins to everything.
Because it's 25 mins to get to town and 5 mins to get to the other side of town.
I live in the residential area within the limits of a large US city.
And I'd argue that these numbers are remarkably good for people in my situation as well.
I've personally lived in places where the closest convenience store was 2.25 km, and the grocery store was nearly 18km, as well as places where a convenience store was literally a part of my building, and grocery stores were walkable distances.
The U.S. is enormous and varied. Take a look at truesizeof and compare the U.S. and Europe (don't forget to add Alaska and Hawaii - they won't be included in the contiguous states). Consider how different London is from rural Romania.
Here, let me show you.
Having a large country doesn't necessarily mean that your cities and towns have to spread like crazy. Russia is even larger but the cities are much more compact than US cities.
This graphic doesn't answer OP's question at all. Madrid and Barcelona are two radically different cities just like New York and Los Angeles are two radically different experiences. And it has nothing to do with how big a country is.
I live in a suburb in the U.S.
Notes:
I have run to the park before despite being far away, but I think most people would (rightfully) think I was suicidal for doing so. A lot of the way to the park requires walking on dangerous streets where people drive fast around blind curves and where there is little to no shoulders to squeeze by if there are cars, most of the way has no sidewalks, and I have to cross busy roads where drivers are going 80+kmh.
Owning a car here is considered a part of being an adult, people without a car are seen as childish or immature, and usually suspected of being drunks who have lost their license due to DUIs or felons who cannot have a driving license and aren't allowed to leave the state. It is assumed everyone drives everywhere, alternatives are unthinkable to most people here.
Those distances would be perfect for a bicycle if you had save bicycle lanes
Well, those distances use a nearby highway, and there are no bike lanes anywhere (let alone sidewalks). As mentioned earlier, being suicidal means I did use a bicycle anyway, and after a couple years I had a brain injury, was hit by cars twice and ended up with permanent injuries. So... yeah, I don't recommend cycling (if you feel like being alive and able-bodied, anyway).
What is also not mentioned is that the nearest supermarket is a shitty Walmart, the nearest park is very small and not really worth going to, and the bus is not a practical form of public transit here.
I have to drive 20 - 30 minutes to actually get to stores, parks, or other places I would actually go to. I think that's pretty good relative to most people, I live in a centralized location and most places are equidistant. I used to live in a nearby more rural town and I had to drive 45 - 60 minutes to get most places, and that was much worse.
(That's why I said if you had safe bicycle lanes. But are there no local politicians who'd be willing to do anything about that? A gravel road isn't that expensive and would suffice.)
The county mayor describes himself as a Rothbardian, and the government here sometimes feels openly hostile to people, but especially to bicyclists. I received a lot of harassment for cycling, it is not supported culturally, and is even viewed as though I am a political enemy of the people. Huge, lifted emotional-support trucks are pretty common here.
Damn
Oh and bicycling also wasn't popular in Europe when my grandfather was young (50s/60s), when you were cycling people thought you were too poor to buy a motorcycle. But mindsets can change, now bicycling is hugely popular both for moving around (especially in cities) and for sports.
yeah, during COVID the mayor became famous for running attack ads against the health department, and as a result of his leadership the state legislature stripped the health department of their ability to implement any policies or directives
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 Jersey (New). As a background, I'm at the edge of civilization, I like to joke. If you go west of me, there's farms, what we call mountains, hiking, all that kinda stuff. To the east of me, it gets more and more urban until you get to NYC.
Here are my walking distances:
Adding:
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: Just shy of 3500 miles. Straight-line distance to the Statue of Liberty: 30 miles
Your location sounds pretty optimal.
It depends on where you live. I have multiple stores around me I walk to all the time, and it takes 20 minutes to drive through the city with no traffic.
But I've also lived where you absolutely need a car because everything is so spread out just going to the store would be 15 minutes in a car.
I'm in the uk too but I'm out in the northern countryside, just to get to the village newsagents is a 15-20 minute walk and it's about 12 miles to the nearest supermarket. Even in the UK there are places where you have to drive to almost everywhere.
Had to look that up! It’s a little convenience store that sells newspapers
The US is pretty big man and things are different in different regions. England is only as big as Alabama.
In the cities you can walk to places or take much more limited public transportation.
Every one outside of the city has a car though. Drive through banks, fast food, pharmacies, and even liquor stores are a real thing.
My commute to work is ~40 minute drive and some of that is at 129 kph.
I rarely walk anywhere for anything besides pleasure. There is a restaurant within ~10 minutes walk but most roads don't even have sidewalks here and people don't always pay attention while driving
The East Coast can be as dense as Europe, because that built up quickly before cars were a rhing. People in cities can walk everywhere, and driving is slower due to traffic
The hills stayed rural and can take forever.
Midwest is the stereotypical America you have to drive everywhere. If you try to walk somewhere in a small town, everyone is going to stop to offer a ride assuming your car broke down
The "fly over" states are giant agricultural farms with nothing in between them. Walking is impossible but you can likely get on a freeway/highway quickly and drive times may be similar to the Midwest, just less options
The west Coast is also densely populated, but happened after the popularity of cars and most cities are designed for cars not pedestrians.
The West Coast isn't always so bad to pedestrians. Downtown Palo Alto is extremely walkable for example:
https://www.walkscore.com/score/loc/lat=37.4213/lng=-122.1416/?utm\_source=liquidspace.com&utm\_medium=ts\_api&utm\_campaign=ts\_api
I live pretty close to work, it’s about 15 miles (24 km). Grocery store is about 6 miles (9.6 km) from me. I consider anything within 2 miles (3.2 km) to be “right next door.” It’s not uncommon for me to travel over 100 miles (161 km) in a day. I consider When I want to visit my Sister it’s a 1120 mile (1802 km) journey. That happens a couple times a year. The crazy thing is that that’s less than halfway across the continental US. I have to travel from the Atlantic ocean all the way across the international date line in the Pacific to get across the US, and that doesn’t include our territories, just our states.
What I have found is a better comparison is the US and Europe. Think of the european country’s as us states and you start to get an idea of the scale. 44 countries vs 50 states, $24.22 trillion vs $28.65 trillion GDP, 10.2 million sq km vs 9.8 million sq km. They are very similar.
Where I grew up the closest neighbor was about 2km away, nearest town was 25k, nearest town with a decent grocery store was around 40km, and the nearest "city" was damn near 100km.
Wow, my London brain just melted (The beach is only 60km away)
Houston tx, sprawling urban hell. in a swamp. I'll only give a few
My most common doctors office: 16miles, 26 km My best friend: 30 miles, 50 km Bus stop: 2.5 km Grocery store: 6 miles, 10 km
Keep in mind this is a major metropolitan city with 4 million people, fairly hefty public transport, and is surrounded by other smaller cities. From center it's like 15-17 miles to the next edge. There's a smaller city inside of Houston called Bellaire lol.
Let's just say I have an office job and still manage to drive 35,000 miles a year.
Fun fact: the circumference of the earth is 24,000 miles!
I used to work as a service technician so I'd also have to travel more than the circumference of the earth every year. I feel your pain lol
An interesting data point in this discussion is to look at the list of countries in order of population density and see just how far down the list the US is.
We have a lot of people, some big cities, some major institutions, and a huge economy, but we also have a LOT of space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
I could easily walk to a grocery store in 10 minutes; however, there’s no sidewalks, no streetlights if it was dark, and I’d have to cross a road with a speed limit of 55mph. On the way I’d pass a gun store, so maybe I could pick one up and pop off a couple rounds into the air to make a temporary crosswalk.
Many Americans still live in what I'd call "15 minute cities" if we consider it as driving instead of walking.
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.
Where I grew up in rural texas: these are current times as I still go there regularly to visit.
Convenience store: 10 km down a major highway
Market: 20 km
The nearest Walmart : 58 km <-- this used to be the only option until they built ... The nearest chain grocery: 21 km
Train: 60 km (Amtrak)
Park: 8km. Down a road with a 60 mph (96 km/h) speed limit. But definitely walkable.
Bus stop: ??? There is no public transportation in the town of under 2000 people. Google maps won't even give me a suggestion so...I have no idea. Does a greyhound count?
Library: 21 km
Username checks out.
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:
Straight-line distance to Capitol Building: about 3 miles (5 km).
I live in a suburban area of Columbus, Ohio.
You also mention you can get somewhere within 10 minutes of walking. A lot of Americans will refuse to walk that far. For many people in the country and the suburbs, the bulk of the outdoor walking they do is to/from their cars and to get the mail.
It's hard for Europeans to understand, but nearly all American cities are built around the concept that everyone has their own car and drives everywhere to get around. Even things that are 5 minute walks, Americans will get in the car and drive to. Mass transit (again in most cities) is coded as "for poor people who can't afford a car", so it's always difficult to use and is much slower than having your own car.
Just for fun, I decided to check my distances against yours
Here are my walking distances:
I live in a small suburb right outside of a major us city.
To the nearest convenience store: .6 km To the nearest chain supermarket: .9 km To the bus stop: .3km To the nearest park: 1.0km To the nearest big supermarket: .9km To the nearest library: 1.2km To the nearest train station: .6km Straight-line distance to big Ben: 5708 km
You certainly got me on big Ben distance.
But this is why the question is kind of silly. America is a huge, diverse place. When I lived in NYC, I was probably closer to everything than you. Where I grew up in an almost rural area, the closest thing was over 5km away. And this isn't even all that bad because I had a friend who grew up in an unincorporated area where she had to drive 30min just to get her mail.
Is that a typo, or can you just randomly stand at the side of the road and flag down a bus so you don’t need as many formal bus stops?
Because that’s wild.
Not a typo. There are no buses unless you go to one of the neighboring cities. I live too far from anywhere that has buses. You either have to walk, or… you can drive! Like everybody else in the US without access to any sort of public transportation remotely close to their home…
Edit: Here’s my nearest walking directions to a large supermarket
Haha
I can count on a 20+min drive to get most places close to me in a large city. Not that everything is that far, but traffic can be slow.
It kinda depends on where you live. I live in the suburbs near a few large metropolitan areas and I do have a supermarket within a 10 minute walk of me, and a bigger supermarket a 30 min walk away, but there are definitely places where you need a car to go shopping cuz theres no sidewalks or all the roads are like 45mph+ and really only designed for car transit.
I've got family who live in Texas and they say that there's lots of places that are drive thru, like banks and dry cleaners and stuff.
I had a coworker at one of my previous jobs transfer to our US branch from the UK and he said that a lot of his friends were asking him if he was gonna visit Disney World, since he was moving to "just outside of New York City" (read: Pennsylvania, lmao) He said a lot of them were shocked to realize that its like an 18 hour drive from NYC to Disney World in Florida.
Another thing about that job, there was no realistic way for me to get to it by public transit. It was a half an hour drive, but about 3 hours of combined public transit + walking and needed me to take two trains and a bus.
To the nearest convenience store: 2.3mi / 3.7 km
To the nearest chain supermarket: 9mi / 14km (not actually a chain store, it's a small grocery in a small rural town)
To the bus stop: lol, I don't think any of the cities near me bother with that, nor would they be useful to me
To the nearest park: 5mi / 8km (lake, about a 5 minute drive)
To the nearest big supermarket: 14mi / 22km
To the nearest library: 9mi / 14km
To the nearest train station: 51mi / 82km (and this station doesn't service any location I couldn't get to faster than driving, even across country. Because AMTRAK is shit. I know because I've done it before)
This is in central CA, not far at all from the Capitol, Sacramento. For being the 5th biggest economy in the world our capitol is pathetic
Here are my walking distances:
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: 5890km
Here are my walking distances:
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: 7514km
Kept all the units identical to yours for ease of comparison
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.
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: 6,967 km
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.
Hard disagree on DC. The public transit is bad, the train only goes a few places, and the majority of the city is not easily walkable, only the touristy parts. I'd also call it a depressing shithole, but that borders on opinion.
Fair enough, not everyone will have the same experience. The busses can suck; at least the metro is tidy and runs well. My cousin in Georgetown doesn't have a car, and he manages to travel to and access everything he needs, including going out to Potomac or Silver Spring. Going east/west is tricker, but on the flip side DC is rather small for a major city, and they're building the purple line. Public bikes and scooters are also everywhere which is nice for visitors. Additional bike lanes and connectivity is needed for sure.
Compare to Baltimore, where they have the one metro line, which is broken half the time.
WMATA busses need serious work and there aren't enough bike lanes for last mile connectivity, but by US standards it's about as good as it gets outside of NYC.
The busses are the main differentiation between European and US cities in my experience. Only Seattle and SF get close to running a decent bus service.
Hard agree, DC sucks ass. I actually strongly prefer Baltimore, which feels much more like a real city to me. DC is so artificial and bland.
Depends on the part of dc- big chunks of it have $5 million homes for miles. Every major city has slummy areas, but dc for the most part is expensive as shit and gentrified combined with endless government buildings. Also has one of the best museums in the world with over a dozen massive buildings, all free.
You might be thinking of Baltimore :P
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: 85km
Access 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.
Rural American here. We drive 30 mins to the nearest bigish city to do all of our grocery shopping every weekend.
One thing that deserves special note is the US, aside from being more spread out in general, has a lot more sprawling suburbs with downtown areas.....if you live near the downtown, then everything is walkable, but maybe 20% of a towns population in any given suburb will be that close, and thats a generous estimate.
As an American who has lived in the EU, walking / biking like you can do there just plain is not possible for MOST of the US. As other have mentioned, if you live in a major city, or in the center of a suburb, then it may not be so bad.
On a similar note, this sprawl is the same reason that public transport on the EUs level isnt viable in the US....there would need to be too many stops and too many routes to get decent coverage, and when you math it out, having cars is the most economical decision for most of the country.
Distances in North America tend to be measured in hours of driving at highway speeds (usually 65mph/105kmh, but sometimes extra time added going through cities). Houston, Texas for example you can get from one edge of town to the other in an hour, plus up to an extra hour in traffic. The transit options in every metro area are different. The only thing is that people in suburbia are in the middle of a maze that would take 25 minutes on foot to get out of to the nearest convenience store (corner shop). A habit of going every other day for light shopping trips on the way from work is less common and often limited to retirees and non-working parents. What's more common is doing a large cartful of shopping from every week to even once a month, and fitting it all in your monster SUV or pickup truck.
That said lifestyles can vary across the US, suburban vs rural, like New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles will each have their own characteristics with how far things are, how far they feel and, how developed transit is. Between cities, transit is rather disconnected without a car, you have minimal and inconvenient coach bus services and trains that might show up 3 times a week.
Library: 5 or so miles
Convenience store: 1mi
Supermarket: .75mi
Bus stop: .25mi*
Train station: 20-30mi
Park: 2mi
*This stop may be commuter times only .. the stop exists but I never see the buses. Next closest is at supermarket.
I've been more in-city and the only thing nearby by a gas station. Everything else was 1mi+... Nearest supermarket being 6-7mi.
The US is a huge place with lots and lots of different types of communities. From my understanding, some of the older cities on the east coast may have old town walking districts that are probably more like what you’re used to.
I will give you a personal example. I live in Silicon Valley, not in San Francisco or Oakland but rather in what some might call a suburb of those cities, though my “town” has over 80k residents. I live in an area of my city that was once unincorporated and is about two miles from the old town city center. The closest grocery store is 0.7mi from me according to Google maps, and it’s a small family-owned grocer that I’m super happy to have. The larger supermarket is a mile and it’s down a large stroad.
It takes me about 45 minutes to drive to SF with no traffic. If I want to go to Los Angeles, it’s a six hour drive minimum without traffic going 80mph.
Oh boy. I used to live in Houston, TX, a city notorious for being car-dependent...
I will present three sets of numbers. First is where I first moved to in Houston, in a supposedly highly coveted, super walkable area home to mostly medical students... Second is the place I lived before I moved out (and I used to boast to people how accessible the place was, by US standards). Third is in Chicago, close to city center ("The Loop").
And FYI I only lived in places that would be considered to be within the city, so these might be as small as they can get...
Fun story about the first location! Everything seems so walkable on paper (close to park, close to highway), until you realize that there was no fucking supermarket anywhere within walking distance... H-E-B only opened a store closeby after I moved there. However, even the super-close grocery store is across the highway and I almost never see any sane people walk there so... For parks I am only counting ones that are good enough to be tourist-worthy, otherwise the latter two locations have pretty easy access to lots of green space
And if you are asking about public transit that are not bus/train: respective distances are 1.4km | 1.0km | 280m. The last number in this series is basically how I chose where to live...
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
I moved from a UK city to a town on the edge of Dallas.
There was a crossroads with a strip mall. grocery store, dentist, food places etc, about 15 minutes away, but it was often too hot to walk. Anywhere beyond that was too far to walk.
Everything was so spaced out there. All the shops were surrounded by big parking lots. It was hard to even perceive that I was on a street with shops, at first, because everything was so far away from the road.
Now I live in a quiet street in suburb of LA. There's a main street about 10 minutes away. So within 20 minutes walk I can visit restaurants, grocery stores, etc. Even a British supplies store to get real chocolate. Bus stops, library, doctors, dentist, opthalmologist, and a hospital, too.
But if I want a big department store, I'm driving 15 to 30 minutes.
The broader LA area doesn't really have a center, just clusters of shops and malls at bigger crossroads. It seems endless. I could drive 50 miles to Newport Beach for vacation and never be outside a city.
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
I live in New York (city):
Roughly how big/long is a block in US cities? It’s a measurement you guys use as your cities are so young and were planned out on grids. Where I’m from our cities are pretty chaotic and weirdly shaped as they grew organically through the centuries.
I looked it up and a block in Chicago (where I live) is between 100 to 600 meters.
Chicago and New York have similar walkability, at least in my experience.
Nearest Grocery Store is 1.2 km (0.8miles) away from me, I usually take my bike to go shopping
Nearest park is like... 50 feet from me (15meters) but I happen to live right next to a park.
Nearest cornerstore is 300 meters
Nearest train station is 600 meters
Nearest library is 800 meters
To add some more,
Nearest bar is 400 meters away
I'm a musician, within 1km of me there are 4 open mics I can go to
Nearest theater is the Music Box which is 1.2 km away
Nearest baseball stadium is 1 km away
God I love Chicago
What a great reply. Thanks. I understand now that a block is a visual marker rather than a set distance. I’m glad you love Chicago and I hope you have a great life there. Chicago, btw, is the one US city that I’ve always had an interest in. You’ve achieved some amazing things there - long may that continue.
America is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to America.
2.2 Km to nearest chemist / convenience store.
Actually, the chemist's for me is only about 350m away, next to the chain supermarket
Found Douglas' Lemmy account. Hi, Douglas.
Straight-line distance to Golden Gate Bridge: 11.6km
Having a small market so close is a massive improvement from my previous address, where the only option was a big supermarket 3.9km away.
Distances seem about the same in my small US town.
No train.
Little further to Big Ben, i think.
It depends what region your in.
City: depends where you live, i.e. how close to "downtown" you are. A lot of stuff is walking distance, but not everything. You could walk to school and get some basic food or a pharmacy. Probably need a car/bus for work or larger grocery trips.
Suberbs/town, you might be able to walk to convince store or to school/library, everything else is going to be a car or about a 30min walk. That being said, sometimes you're "deep" in the suberb and the nearest convince store is a 20-40 min walk.
Rual/farm: you need a a car to visit your neighbors. Nearest grocrey is a 30 min drive away.
Far.
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.
It isn't just that things are too far to walk, it's that American car companies have made it part of our culture to own and drive, and it's unpatriotic to do otherwise. That causes a severe lack of public transportation and sidewalks and bike lanes. So because of all this, I have to drive a mile through my neighborhood to get to a 7-Eleven that would be a quarter mile if I walked.
I have a coworker who believes "they" are trying to get us all to live in 15 minute cities so that we can't have cars because that's how they'll keep us from... Driving to other cities? I don't know, keep us from... something good, I guess?
I live in a semi rural area. My closest grocery store is 10km, but it's down the interstate, meaning even if I wanted to walk it, I couldn't. Without using the interstate it's about 15km.
My closest convenience store is only 7km, but the road i live on is not safe for walking (lots of blind curves, no sidewalks)
My nearest bus stop is 60 kilometers away, in my nearest city.
Nearest library is about 4 km past the convenience store, so 11ish klicks
Nearest train station is give or take 300 kilometers. We don't really have any train service here.
Straight line distance from me to big Ben, give or take 6,500 kilometers
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):
I used Google maps to get these values. I'm using Google's estimated walking distance and will also include Google's estimated walking time.
I'm in Utah somewhere south of Salt Lake City (the state capitol). The numbers aren't great, but they're far better than some places I've lived here. As a kid, I remember biking for 20+ minutes to make it to a small supermarket.
EDIT: as others have said, my paths can be quite bendy at times, but it's different than many suburbs in the US. Salt Lake City (and, by extension, most of the valley that it's in) is built on a fairly rigorous grid system. We have lots of straight roads with large blocks (in some cases, it can be 1-2 km between lights and crosswalks). We don't have too many ratfucked suburban mazes, so the walkability problem here is primarily due to sprawl and a dearth of crosswalks.
Just to give the other side. I live in a big city in the US.
Convenience store: .2 miles, 320 meters
Chain supermarket: .5 miles, 800 meters
Bus stop: 300 feet, 90 meters
Park: 0.2 miles, 320 meters
Big supermarket: 0.4 miles, 640 meters
Library: 0.9 miles, 1.4 kilometers
Train Station: 0.3 miles, 480 meters
Living in a small town in central North Carolina (answering these questions in units of city blocks that are ~150 meters long or in statute miles:
To the nearest convenience store: 4 blocks
To the nearest chain supermarket: 2 miles
To the bus stop: ~35 miles (It's a distance to the nearest town with a bus service)
To the nearest park: 8 or 9 blocks
To the nearest BIG supermarket: 2.5 miles. The "nearest chain supermarket" is a Food Lion; slightly farther down the road is a Wal-Mart and a Harris Teeter about the same distance away.
To the nearest library: 3 blocks
To the nearest train station: 4 blocks.
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: ~4000 miles. juuuust out of earshot. I don't recommend walking.
Nashville TN suburbs and here are my walking distances:
But what's your straight line distance to the Parthenon?
Nice try stalker! (Jk)
Straight line distance to the Parthenon: 9101.70 km
Based on the small town where I grew up:
Note that a lot of the roads don’t have sidewalks so even if you want to walk it can be kinda dangerous depending on time of day.
Based on cities I’ve lived in:
The cities tend to be a lot more walkable, but you still need to take the car or train to get to things like by the bigger (and cheaper) supermarket and other stores. The train is slow and unreliable (sometimes it’s faster to walk than take the train) so cars are much more popular.
This sounds about right for "normal" US towns and cities to me as well
It is fucked here unless you own property already in the good parts or you are upper class income and can move your ass into the good parts despite the obsene costs.
I live in the suburbs of a decently sized but not super large city in WI.
I live in NYC. It's one of the few large places in the US that's dense and not completely car focused.
Convenience store: 5 minute walk to several
Supermarket: several within 10 minute walk
Pharmacy: several within 10 minutes on foot
Library: I think there's two within 10-15 minutes walking
Restaurants: several within 10 minutes on foot
Subway: about 5 minute walk. There's also a bus stop there.
Very large park: 15 minutes or so
I never want to live somewhere where I need a car again. Someone I was talking to at a party the other day was like "I love having my car it's so much freedom" and I'm like aside from needing to fuel, maintain, insure, and store it I guess.
I'll chime in since I'm in Canada, which is sadly just US delayed by 20 years.
I can walk to a convenience store with high prices in about 5 minutes or 360 metres and little else. It's all residential beyond there until a 25 minute walk or greater and everything is spread out. The main shopping centres you might want to walk around are an hour walk away. To reach the store I actually shop at for reasonable prices, it's a 12 minute drive or a 7400 metre walk (a miserable one with spotty sidewalks)... just for fun, it's about 45m by bus BEST CASE but realistically you will take an hour unless you hit the exact right bus at the exact moment it pulls up.
But that varies.
Here it's < 100m to the food shopping, pharmacy, post office, Amazon pickup, pros like dentist and barber and a hospital, separate medical test office, some medical specialists, as well as two gyms and a daycare. Hopping the train gets me to one of two biiig malls in about 5 or 20 min. 200m out is a plethora of doctors and specialists, 2 coffee/snack shops, and 2 of the 5 pizza places nearby. Go the km and you'll pass the Starbucks, sandwiches, park, church, more takeout, and 7-11.
We're designed for no-car though. Inasmuch as many Canadian cities still need a car, and while I'm cheating by working 100% remote since CoViD, I haven't driven a car in about a year. This is a special island of accessibility, which they're trying to put around all the train stations and experiment with more walking.
But distances are still crazy for visitors. People land in Toronto and ask "can we take a day trip to Banff?" Not realizing it could be 71 hours of driving to get there.
Travelling to see my family via ferry is a 5-6 hour 100km trip if I optimize it, since it's so inefficient. airplanes cost as much as 120 Starbucks medium frothy hot drinks for the 50km air portion of the trip round-trip, per person, so we avoid that option.
Our little pet island on the west coast, for instance, where we have some quaint buildings and such, is almost 500km long -- which could be the distance almost from dover to Scotland if I believe my AI pothead.
This land mass is huge. You have no idea.
I live in rural Ohio and I drive about 40 miles (65 km) round trip a day just getting to and from work, and that's pretty average for a rural area.
The nearest grocery store and back is about a 15 mile (25 km) round trip.
In the rural areas, which account for most of the land area of the US, things are far enough apart that it makes it impossible to survive without a vehicle.
Rural areas accont for most land in europe as well. East of the mississippi the us is overall similear density to europe - less dense but not by much.
Here are my walking distances in Seattle:
Straight-line distance to Space Needle: 4.3km
Nearest grocery store is a little over 3 miles. Libraries about four and a half miles. Nearest passenger train is about 200 miles away. I think there's a bus stop about half a mile away but I don't know if it's a full-service one.
Depends on the state. There are places where stores are 2+ hours away by car.
In my area, it falls into 2 categories-
This is totally based on traffic and roads- I’m in the woods outside Washington DC, so while the density is high in the cities, I’m 15 min from literally everything minimum (by car). I couldn’t walk or bike to a store, I’m 30ish min from work combination highway and local roads.
If you live in a city, you might live literally on top of stores in the same building. Shopping centers with above condos and apartments are becoming a popular replacement for shopping malls in my area, but are very very expensive (often over $1million) for a townhouse in one of these shopping “communities”.
I buy nearly everything online and have it delivered, most stuff (groceries, goods, electronics, housewares, etc) come between 0-3 days.
Highly dependent on where you live. Some places are very sparse, others are pretty dense.
I went to College about 65 miles west of Chicago (or about 1 hour driving). One weekend some friends decided to take a road trip to Maine so one friend could confess their love to someone. They left Friday after classes ended and drove nonstop, took one hour in Maine for the friend to get shot down, and then dove back. They didn't get back until late Sunday night. That's about 1300 miles and with a few bathroom/food stops 24 hours each way.
Nearest convenience store is 200m Chain supermarket is 200m Bus stop is 150m Library is 50m Park is 500m Train station is 800m
NYC makes everything easy
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.
To piggy back off this comment, I'm surprised the streetcars in Kenosha, WI don't get brought up much for what we could have:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcars_in_Kenosha,_Wisconsin
It began in June 2000. It was done by doing the municipal equivalent of looking for deals on Craigslist; they bought old cars from larger cities and did a little conversion to get the track gauge right.
Can every small town do this? As it stands, probably not. It depends on larger cities having hand-me-down trolleys, and there just aren't enough cities doing that for it to work on a widespread basis. But I think it does show that there's a path to doing this in North American small cities if larger cities can get their shit together.
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?
Did you read your comment?
You took that out of context.
That was intended to mean, as I said, in a modern context. As in you cannot get there via public transportation today. This conversation has nothing to do implementing transportation, this has to do with what we have and how accessible smaller towns are.
So were you looking to be angry or something?
My refrigerator is annoyingly far from my desk chair.
Putting a minifrige under my desk was one of the best bad decisions I've made.
It varies wildly depending on where you go. I think the worst-case scenario in terms of car-built cities would be someplace like Phoenix, Arizona. Visiting that city, I gained an appreciation for what it must be like to have a physical handicap that affects your mobility, because being in Phoenix without a car is comparable to having a disability. You cannot go anywhere on your own two feet in any reasonable length of time. It's the kind of place where you need to find a Walmart to buy a loaf of bread. The closest thing to a corner store is going to be a gas station.
As you might note, the busier and more dense a city is, the closer things can be yet the longer it takes to get somewhere per unit of distance. Unless you walk. Sometimes you're out in the burbs and something's 10 miles away but it'll take you less than 10 mins to get there.
Things around me aren't that far per se, but you have to cross a 45mph road (where people regularly drive 55-60 because it's designed like a highway) along several sections of unconnected sidewalk if you want to get there without a car. The sidewalks are 4ft wide at most and have no separation from the car lanes so you have to walk with cars whizzing by just a couple feet from you. There's also no shade.
For reference - it takes 5 minutes to drive to the nearest grocery store 1 mile away, but walking it's 31 minutes with the unpleasant conditions I mentioned. So I've never walked there. I could bike and it would take 10 minutes, but biking along cars at 50mph doesn't sound fun. I also live on a bike path, but it doesn't go to the nearest grocery store so the nearest one along the bike path would take the same amount of time as if I walked to the nearest one (25 minutes). That one is 3.5 miles (11min) by car or a 1hr walk.
I live out west. Think of how far would be intolerable to walk in 45 degree heat and then add 30 minutes standing by the road, waiting for traffic lights to change, so you can attempt to cross without a crosswalk or a sidewalk, while you roast in the added heat from car exhaust.
Depends on the place like everyone else has said.
Here in London, using a car is pain and suffering with single-digit average speeds due to intense traffic jams
One of my high school girlfriends had to drive 45 minutes each way to school, and home. About 36 miles. She lived in the middle of nowhere near a state park.
In my home town getting to most basic necessities took 20min driving. Mind you that was the capital city of my state
At my parents' place, it's about 9 miles (~14km) to the nearest gas station/convenience store, which has super limited hours, or roughly a 15 minute drive. It's about 14 miles (~23km) to the nearest grocery store, or about a 20 minute drive.
I live in the suburbs of a major city, so the nearest stores from me are around a mile (1.6km) away. The nearest big supermarket is like 2 miles (3.2km) away.
Take a look at a population density map of the US. A lot of the places that don't light up are agricultural. If for some reason you have never seen a real farm before and always wanted to then by all means come on by, but we call them "flyover states" for a reason. All the cool tourist destinations are in the glowy bits.
I assume you were asking for tourist reasons anyway. If you were just asking for curiosity sake, it depends where you live. I live in the rural part of Illinois and it only takes 15 - 20 minutes to get to a supermarket by car, but walking there is completely out of the question. Especially with the hills. Oh God, my feet hurt just thinking about it.
Yup, just curious, because there are a lot of people moaning about the situation in some parts of the US
Depends heavily where you live. Rural places can be an hour drive to the closest grocery store. For me, I live about 5 minute drive from stores and my work. But I cannot feasibly walk to where I want to go, there is zero sidewalks in my area and cars go at least 35 mph on the slow neighborhood roads and 50 mph on the busier main roads (less than 3 minute drive to get to either one). Bus and train infrastructure is basically non-existent so not an option. My only option is risk my life on a bike on the shoulder of the main road (since theres no bike lanes) and hope the weather isn't bad or I have to drive a car .
Bank: 24 miles / 38.6km Grocery store: 4 miles / 6.4 km Work: 50 miles / 70km Parents house: 703 miles / 1131 km
I need to move closer for work, but couldn't afford it do to dumb choices for a bit there.
Highest annual average miles driven per driver is Wyoming with 24,069 mi per year or about 65.898 mi a day.
Lowest is Rhode Island with 9,961 mi per year or 27.272 per day
The top 10 populous cities have the average physical distance between as 1241.3, 1070.5, and 1073.7 miles for places, urban areas, and core-based statistical areas, respectively.
The longest driveable stretch between two populations of any type is over 5,000, but the USA also has several pacific territories.
Btw I know you people tend to get confused so to prevent you from crashing and dying:
1 mi = 1.609344 km
1 km = 0.6213712 mi
Example:
1241.3 mi * 1.609344 km/m = 1,997.6787072 km
As far as walking is considered, theres a ton of grid plans as well as cul de sac plans in the USA which are frankly inferior for walkability compared to our European Neighbors.
The only measure on here that matters to most of the US is the Big Ben, and that is only our daily commute.
The US is big.
Meter measures are for rifle shots or bike rides. Maybe runs. It's not a real measure of travel for us.
I live in a major city
It's a two-hour round trip walk to the nearest convenience store, and its also through rough terrain and lawns that people don't cut
Same figures for me:
Here are my best guesses from living life:
From house to local stores: City-Couple blocks Suburbs-3 to 10 mins Rural-10 to 45 mins
Metropolitan centers are surrounded by Suburbs which is surrounded by rural. That's sort of stat quo. The distance between Metropolitan centers (not including the retarded NYC and LA type areas) is usually a minimum 1hr from closest centers but in most states they're like 3 hrs apart.
Time it takes to go up or down the east coast is 12 to 17 hrs for most that's not the time to get from northern most tip of main to southern most tip of Florida cuz who the fuck actually does that.
Traveling an hour to do something special is common but traveling an hr for something common or necessity is designated for the extreme mountain ranges like Adirondack, Appalachian, Rocky? (Idk never been just assuming) type of areas.
Anything taking longer than an hr is getting into road trip status and anything over 3 hr is find somewhere to stay and come home tomorrow status. There are exceptions bit depending on how long event is you are adding 6hr round trip time to it.
Caveats:
Rush hour is dependent on area. For example in Buffalo a 45 min trip no traffic is taking you around 50min-1hr in rush hour. Whereas in Frederick, MD (D.C. suburb) a 15 min drive no traffic was taking at leasy 1hr in rush hour. All the same it's every single weekday from 6am to 9am and 3pm to 6pm in every Metropolitan area.
State to neighboring state trips are usually 3 to 6 hr. Usual work commute for everyone not commuting to a city (do honestly most of the US) 5 to 30 mins.
I live in a small shithole town in Pennsylvania about an hour drive outside a major city and 15 minutes outside of a smaller city.
The liquor store a dollar store and a few tiny shops are within ~4k Big Macs(top to bottom length) away, but everywhere else needs a car. There is nothing in town other than a few small shops, everything else was closed long before my time.
It's about a 15 minute drive to get to the next town over since all the stores are there. There is no other non car transportation infrastructure near by other than county buses that you shouldn't use unarmed.
The nearest landmark of any cultural significance (outside of going into the city) is the empty field in Somerset county a few hours away.
Basically if I want something other than whiskey or bread, it's a 15 minute drive. Still better than when I was still living with my parents because they were even further out from civilization.
Getting to the next closest state is about a 3 hours trip and I'm close to the border.
Phoenix suburbs
We don't really have public transportation at all
Nearest convenience store 1.5 miles
Nearest chain grocery store 4.2 miles
Nearest big grocery store (Costco)2.8 miles
Nearest library 1.9 miles
Nearest park 0.6 miles(there's a playground closer but it's tiny)
Straight line to big Ben 5285 miles
I live in a planned community where everything is supposed to be accessible by walking or biking. There are greenway paths all over the place. I generally drive because I can't carry a weeks worth of food on my bike and most destinations don't have a safe place to lock your bike up. An unattended bike seems to be considered a free bike.
Convenience store - 700m Grocery store -1,2km Bus stop - 150m Park - 400m Big supermarket - 1,2km Library - 2,5km Train station - 79km
Corner store with basics: 5 min Supermarket: 15 min Restaurants: 5 min Park: 3 min Bus stop: 5 min Library: 15 min Local rail: 20 min Regional/National rail: 40 min
All walking distances. I live in a neighborhood that was designed before cars existed so it’s more like Europe in terms of distances/amenities. Except our transit infrastructure is shit.
Walking?
5 minutes to cafe for toast and coffee, or the closest corner store/gas station
10-15 minutes walk to the closet big grocery store, or pharmacy, better corner store/gas station, also to roller skating and bowling, a jewelry store, like 15 churches, lawyers, medical supply, doctor offices, a hospital, a bank, fast food and small independent restaurants, lots of stuff.
20-25 to work or to the good grocery
It's certainly not London!!! But if you are inside a mid-sized city there is stuff within easy walking distance, and more within short drive (5 minutes) My husband came from the suburbs and that's a different story - house farms ringed by roads too dangerous to cross, everyone drives everywhere. He used to think of "close" as anything a 15 minute drive or less! Not anymore.
83 miles from Disney World, that's probably the closest international landmark, lol. But maybe 4 miles from the beautiful Tampa Theater, which ought to be an international landmark.
Small town in Oregon here (all measured along the routes walked, not 'as the crow flies'):
Now, I'm not entirely sure what separates a supermarket from a "big supermarket" in your mind, because to me all supermarkets are quite big by definition, so I'm going to explore three different trip options: one each to two supermarkets in or near my town, and one to the nearest Walmart, which I'm 100% sure should count as a "big supermarket", but which is a couple towns away.
Supermarket A is close enough that walking to it is a viable option, which would be ~730 meters to the edge of the parking lot or ~875 meters to the front of the store. Alternatively, if I can plan the scheduling of my trip around it or I'm not picky about the timing I can walk ~100 meters to the nearest stop in the city bus loop, wait a while, and walk of right at the front.
Supermarket B is 2.6 kilometers by foot, but a large part of that trip is walking along the side of a lightly-developed highway with no sidewalks, so I don't consider walking here a viable option. By bus it's the same 100 meters to the bus stop, wait, then directly to the storefront.
The nearest Walmart is ~25 kilometers away by car, but the local bus company doesn't offer a direct route to that town so I have to take a bus to Town C, take the Town C Bus Company's bus to the east edge of Town D, then take Town D's bus to the Walmart on the western edge. Google Maps says this would take just over 2 hours one-way, and it would cost $2 ($4 round trip) because Town D's busses are all free to ride at the moment.
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
For me things were not in meters or feet but hours driven. From my home town the nearest stoplight was 1.5 hours away by car. This is also the closest chain restaurant (like McDonald's or simular). We had a school bus, but other than that no public transit. The next town over (15 minutes) has a supermarket.
it takes half an hour to walk (one-way) to the nearest store
I live in a newly developed area. The nearest convenience store to me is a ~10 minute drive. Also, since people only started living here a few years ago, the city has only just started paying attention to quality of life things like shade trees, so you'd be walking a good 45 minutes there and back in direct sunlight.
I fucking hate this country 🙃
Wow. I thought I lived in a pretty walkable part of Atlanta. I really only use my car for the grocery or a 'big' shopping trip.
And I don't even live anywhere the centre: I live in one of the only London boroughs without an Underground station, that borders
no man's landthe outside of Londonabout 20 minutes to the grocery store, 5 to the convenience store, about 10 to the bus stop 20 to the park. West coast.
According to wikipedia, the contiguous 48 states of the US (which occupy the middleish part of North America) are 8,080,464.3 km2, compared to Europe’s 10,180,000 km2, so that should give you an idea. My country is nearly as big as your entire continent, thus things are very spread out. Also our entire modern culture was designed around cars, suburbs and racism, so towns are flat, expansive and nothing is close to anything useful unless you have a car—woe to those without (myself included).
I love in a suburb of a Midwestern state capital.
Here are my walking distances: (I'll do my best to convert distances)
Of all of these, only the walk to the Capitol is shorter than the drive (by about 1.5km) due to walking paths. I've never walked it all in one go, but I have walked both halves of the trail.
Depends on location, but I don’t think I’m too bad.
Where my friend lives, in a typical American suburb:
(These feel like clues to Jet Lag: the Game - Hide and Seek...)
Sorry bro what is m? 😂
1 m is approximately 3 ft
I figured the 😂 emoji would convey me being silly 🤷♂️
I laughed but I also figured some people probably don't know the general conversion is that easy. I'm not sure who's so salty they down voted you.
I’m pretty sure a meter is a few inches longer than a yard
So like half a banana
Sorry I can only count in full bananas. Reddit really got my brain.
About 3 and a bit feet
EDIT: Didn't see above comment sorry
I figured the 😂 emoji would convey me being silly 🤷♂️