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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> note that most car trips are less than ~15 minutes, at which point, all that heating/cooling is wasted as you flush it out the door.

Talking about energy efficiency: if your car trip is <15 minutes, then ideally you shouldn't be using a car at all!

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> Talking about energy efficiency: if your car trip is <15 minutes, then ideally you shouldn't be using a car at all!

That depends on where you live. It take me about 5-7 minutes to drive to the nearest store (a "Dollar General" store). That store is about 2.5 miles away, so about a 5 mile round trip. Average walking speed is about 3.2 mph, so a +2 hour trip walking it.

The next nearest store is about 10-12 miles away (a grocery store). Most of those miles are on a road with a 55mph limit but these are curvy hilly roads so probably closer to a 40-45 mph average. That's a +6 hour walk.

Riding a bicycle is akin to death wish on those 2 lane roads with no shoulder.

This sounds so weird. Like a place that has no general store in walking distance implies end of the world but then you say it has bad traffic too. And 2-lane road with no shoulder implies it's not a highway in the middle of nowhere but a place where people live. Why has nobody opened a shop closer? Seems like easy money.

He didn’t say it has bad traffic, he said it’s dangerous. I grew up in a place like this - isolated houses along a 2-lane road through the countryside with no shoulder. It’s a local road, but the speed limit is typically 55 mph because the housing density is very low. There’s not much traffic, but the traffic that is there is flying down the curvy road just trying to hang on. All of the stores are centralized in small towns and villages spaced 20 miles apart or so.

Yeah I just have no reference. Here villages spaced 30 km from each other doesn't happen. It's usually walking distance.

To get a better idea of that sort of context, look at Texas or Montana in Google Maps and zoom in on one of the low-population areas. You'll see plenty of little towns with no public transit that would be literally days away from each other if walking.

You hit the nail on the head. I live in rural southern Missouri in the Ozark Mountains.

Likely restrictive zoning. In much of North America, commercial and mixed-use buildings are not permitted in areas zoned for single-family residences.

> It take me about 5-7 minutes to drive to the nearest store (a "Dollar General" store)

Assuming you live in an urban area, this seem like absolute madness to me. Does this not represent a huge opportunity for someone to start a local grocery store business?

I have never lived further than 15 minutes walk to the local grocery store (and I considered that a pretty inconvenient location). Where I live now I have a 2 local shops ~1 minute walk away, with a small high street with a small supermarket ~10 minutes walk away. And I would say this is pretty typical across the entirety of urban/suburban UK.

US post-war neighborhoods built after the advent of cars, were mostly designed for them. It's not madness, as much as it is the inevitable result of consumer demands for what was at the time, new housing.

> Does this not represent a huge opportunity for someone to start a local grocery store business?

Those stores do mostly exist where they are viable. The limiting factors are:

1. many of those neighborhoods don't have commercial space, and are filled with people who live there specifically because they do not want to live by commercial property, and support zoning regulations to keep grocery stores from being built besides their property.

2. because many people do have cars, neighborhood grocery stores are sometimes at a commercial disadvantage, because many of their potential customers can easily drive to stores with greater selection.

I do like living in more lively neighborhoods, and I picked one where I do have two small grocery stores within 15 minutes walking distance. The thing is, they're both ethnic grocery stores with limited selections. I try to support them when I can but to get everything that I want to buy in one shopping trip, it's much quicker and easier to drive out of my neighborhood to a much larger store.

In the US, that frequently involves crossing 6 to 8 lane roads with 40mph+ speed limits, and 200ft setbacks to allow for huge parking lots. Or an actual highway where only motorized vehicles are allowed.

if only we could collectively realize this and reconfigure our urban spaces according to that consideration! for instance, adding many, many more street trees everywhere, replacing street parking with protected bike lanes, and converting a lane on major streets to dedicated bus lanes with synchronized/sensored lights.

but yes, for those majority short trips, the wind in your hair on a (electric) bike/scooter is likely just as cooling, and the trip likely no longer.

I wonder how improved traffic could be if we somehow had managed that people driving alone would be driving in a vehicle that is suited for exactly 1 person. (although now I'm having pictures in my head of the insane traffic in India's cities... :))

Maybe electric vehicles could be an incentive to downsize vehicles?

for sure. on top of energy taxes, we could assess escalating maintenance fees on cars by size and weight, to encourage right-sized vehicles, especially in metro areas where it really matters.

There are several studies on the relationship between vehicle weight and road wear and tear. 1 fully loaded semi does more damage than nearly 10,000 cars. The reality is if costs were assigned appropriately large aspects of life would become unworkable.

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