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
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
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.
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.