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To Americans: How far apart is everything in the US? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

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.