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

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Small town in Oregon here (all measured along the routes walked, not 'as the crow flies'):

Convenience Store: ~150 meters, right down the road
Supermarket: Will get back to later
Bus Stop: The local bus company runs a loop around town so there's technically one closer to my house than the convenience store, but the busses that can take you to another town stop at the one ~400 meters away.
Park: Three parks, which are ~400, ~500, and ~580 meters away respectively, though there's not much of anything at the 400 meter one but some sports fields.
Big Supermarket: Will get back to later
Library: ~500 meters (the 500 meter park is right across from it)
Train Station: 29 kilometers by car to the nearest passenger rail station I can find. Without a car I'd need to walk ~400 m to the bus stop, take a $1 bus ride with the local company to Town B, then take another bus ran by this town's company, and then walk another ~480 meters because they don't have a stop at the station. Google Maps predicts that trip will take about 1 hour 20 minutes one-way, and it would cost $2 (or $4 round trip).

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

In the UK we have smaller "urban supermarkets" that sell everything you might need at home but there's not much choice in it, and there's a lot of ready to eat meal options. Kinda like a corner shop plus.

And then there are the fuck off huge supermarkets that are like THE Wallmart on the interstate on, usually, the edges of urban areas which have foreign food isles, clothes, toys, and more types of toothpaste than you could use in a lifetime of brushing three times a day.