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Comment by oblib | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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