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
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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