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
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.