In a city, yes.
In a suburb, the solution isn't anything except building more and better roads.
People aren't bicycling 10-15 miles to the grocery.
They should be, but, that's a different societal problem.
In a suburb, the solution isn't anything except building more and better roads.
People aren't bicycling 10-15 miles to the grocery.
They should be, but, that's a different societal problem.
When I lived in a tiny Cambridge commuter village 30-minute cycle out from where I worked, the local grocery store was closer to me than one corner of Milton Tesco car park is from its opposite.
Here in Berlin? First place I stayed, out in the suburbs, the basics were a bit further — 300m for a bakery — but there were also seven supermarkets within 1 km.
Instead of cars making trips within cities faster, we started tolerating the same commute but spreading cities out more.
†5-10 minutes (?).
That's not a solution. Suburbs are self-bankrupting by definition: they're so sparse the taxes can't cover the infrastructure cost.
The solution is to relax zoning and make the suburb denser and liveable.
Removing and narrowing roads is a good way to do that: it increases space available for non-car infrastructures and produces free surface for "neighbourhood businesses". It also naturally routes through traffic around the area, rather than having to force that through inconvenient culs-de-sacs and making the suburb into a maze which requires driving 10 minutes to go to the neighbor's house.
Not in the US. In the US "in the middle of nowhere" is grocery runs of 50+ miles. 15 miles is a "far out" suburbian hellscape e.g. https://i1.wp.com/cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1080/1*AEfVhyv... or https://bostonglobe-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/h2N-h...
There are, of course, other supermarkets much closer (2 within walking distance) but they are not quite so big, have a limited choice and are situated in areas which attract a certain class of clientel (known in the UK as Chavs). For him, the inconvenience is worth it - although it does take 3 hours out of my day.
I don't get going to a supermarket at all. We've had groceries delivered once or twice a week from Sainsburys, Ocada, Tesco, Asda, etc for about 10 years.
The concept of walking around a supermarket on a regular basis fills me with dread - all that wasted time and effort.
Apparently you can't just put a generic "grocery" as the destination, but if you search for "grocery" and check different results, you'll get 10-15mn for all of them.
That's pretty standard US suburban sprawl, usually under the insanity that is euclidean zoning: entire neighbourhoods zoned exclusively for detached single-family homes, not allowing any business (no bakery, grocery store, florist, no nothing) and no multi-family dwellings.