To Americans: How far apart is everything in the US? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) by dch82@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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

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[-] Badabinski@kbin.earth 3 points 6 hours ago

I used Google maps to get these values. I'm using Google's estimated walking distance and will also include Google's estimated walking time.

Convenience store
- Distance: 800 m
- Time: 11 minutes
Chain supermarket
- Distance: 1.1 km
- Time: 15 minutes
Bus stop
- Distance: 230 m
- Time: 3 minutes
Park:
- Distance: 450 m
- Time: 7 minutes
Big supermarket (Walmart)
- Distance: 1.7 km
- Time: 23 minutes
Library
- Distance: 2.7 km
- Time: 37 minutes
Train station (local light rail)
- Distance: 3.1 km
- Time: 43 minutes

I'm in Utah somewhere south of Salt Lake City (the state capitol). The numbers aren't great, but they're far better than some places I've lived here. As a kid, I remember biking for 20+ minutes to make it to a small supermarket.

EDIT: as others have said, my paths can be quite bendy at times, but it's different than many suburbs in the US. Salt Lake City (and, by extension, most of the valley that it's in) is built on a fairly rigorous grid system. We have lots of straight roads with large blocks (in some cases, it can be 1-2 km between lights and crosswalks). We don't have too many ratfucked suburban mazes, so the walkability problem here is primarily due to sprawl and a dearth of crosswalks.

this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024

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