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

  • AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee
    25·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • frezik
      2·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
      11·
      2 months ago

      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?

        • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
          11·
          2 months ago

          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?