I find it amusing that technically, time is the best and only measure of distance, since the meter is defined as the distance traveled by light in 1/299792458 of a second.

It's the best measure of distance in determining how far away a destination is.

Let's say you ask me where a store is, and I tell you it's only 500m away. "Great!", you think, "That's an easy walk!" No, it's not, because it's on the other side of a river, and there isn't a crossing particularly close. You'd much rather go to the store that's 1000m away because it's not across a river.

Now you're probably going to say, OK, so let's restrict it to actually allowable paths ... but again, something a few kilometers away that doesn't have good road connections (and the ones that do are full of traffic) is actually much farther away in every way that matters than something that's 10km away but is a straight shot on an empty highway. Urban environments are complicated, and distance doesn't tell you as much as travel time does.

In Utah, because everything is pretty much off the I-15, we often measure distance in time, too, as that the speed limit is ~75 most of the way.

Unless you live in Japan, because they all walk the same speed.

Seriously, ask how far something is in Tokyo and see the response is in time

i mean, if you're talking about how convenient is to shop there it kind of is? Doesn't matter if I'm technically close to a place if I gotta take a long detour to actually arrive.