What can you get to within a 15-minute walk of your house?
A recent YouGov survey asked Americans what they think they should be able to get to within a 15-minute walk of their house.
Of these choices, I can currently walk to all of them from my apartment, aside from a university (no biggie, I’m not currently studying, although there is a Tafe within walking distance), a hospital, and a sports arena.
How many can you get to with a 15 minute walk from your house?
#fuckcars #walkability #urbanism #UrbanPlanning @fuck_cars #walking
Why are bars so low? Do Americans like having to use a car when drinking?
Apparently it’s important that they can walk to a petrol station though.
I live maybe 10 minutes walk from a gas station, it’s the size of a small grocery store, it has lot of staple groceries and a mini restaurant in it that makes pizzas, sub sandwiches, coffees, ice cream, and a full breakfast menu. Plus donuts every morning. Our gas stations often take the place of 2/3 businesses rolled into one.
I live by a QT for those Americans familiar with STL’s favorite gas station
American here, the gas station is our version of the local corner store. Most places you have to drive to get to it but where I live there is one right at the entrance to the neighborhood and lots of adults/kids do walk there. I would sorely miss it if it was gone.
I agree with this, but also want to point out that gas stations are a poor substitute for a corner grocer or bodega. They are simply too large and require too much land for the function they are serving. Zoning rightfully mandates that they can’t be on the bottom floor of a larger building due to the dangers posed by gasoline and they require lots of space for cars to park.
Essentially, we have forfeited a lot of valuable space to dispensing gasoline and significantly diminished the best features of corner stores by making them serve both functions. I would be curious to see what would happen if gas stations were forbidden from serving anything other than gas in high density areas. I would assume there would be much fewer of them, and each one would be optimized for efficiency to take up as little space as possible. We would also likely see the reemergence of neighborhood bodegas and corner grocers to fill the gap.
Gas station is a somewhat colloquial form of bodega/corner store in the US. Often corner stores without gas stations will still be referred to as gas stations. Sometimes they’re also called convenience stores.
Wait really? I’m from a big city and I’ve never heard “gas station” refer to a place that didn’t sell gas at all. Huh, TIL
Yeah I know of a few 7-elevens that are just the store, no gas, but would still be thought of as a “gas station”.
If you ever drive through rural America, you’ll usually at least see one or two crosses, often on telephone poles, on rural roads. People, often teenagers, die pretty regularly in rural America because of drunk driving.
Some people like it. Some people are just numb to it. It’s just insane to expect people not to when bars are the only social space in a lot of these towns, and those bars are not accessible by anything but car. There is no such thing as a taxi for most of the US (space wise, not population wise).
That was the one that stood out to me, too (especially the dichotomy between “bars” and “restaurants”). It maybe explains a lot if NIMBYs are actually just moralizing puritans being dishonest about their motives.
This stuck out to me too. This is one of my top items for a 15 min. city, not because I visit bars frequently, but because when I do visit, or when my neighbors visit, I’d like it to be a car-free trip.
@Vash63 @ajsadauskas they drink piss-weak beer and if you have more than two somebody will accuse you of being an alcoholic
Lol, local breweries have completely saturated the American market. I barely know anyone that drinks traditional retail beers anymore outside of sports and/or music venues where outside drinks aren’t allowed.
The website has a British version that doesn’t include bar/pub as a choice at all. Does include liquor store, though. Thought that was odd
Some things go without saying.
Why would you need to ask if a pub should be in a 15 minute city. Its like asking should a house be in a 15 minute city? Should electricity be in a 15 minute city?
Maybe they want to drink at home
I’d wager not a single example of a 15-minute city exists or has ever existed throughout all history without a bar in range.
Probably don’t want to live near drunks, or the piss and vomit that exists after a weekend.
Living near one, I don’t have these issues
That and the noise, bars can be pretty loud
Tbf we’re talking about within a 15 minute walk, not inside your building. There’s a bar 5 minutes away from me and I can’t hear the noise there unless I’m literally standing next to it.
Same, I have a bar a few lots from mine, and it only gets bad a few weekends a year.
I have neighbors that blast music while having super smoky fires and getting piss drunk, though. They are much much worse than the bar. Hands down. Because I can’t have windows open about half the time without my house smelling like smoke (a smell that gives me migraines).
16% said “should not” to a grocery store? What?
I feel like there should be a separate question for the “I don’t want anything near me” rural choice, since those might be making the rest of the responses misleading.
Some people might genuinely prefer a humongous superstore, and the parking lot culture that comes with it.
In the UK, you see tons of “corner shops”, which are just overpriced grocery stores where the owner pretends to be serving the community, but is actually putting his daughter through private school.
In contrast, the Sainsbury’s down the road hires actual suffering locals who you know from high school, the parking lot is full of teens blasting music and worried parents teaching their children how to drive – i.e. there is an actual community happening there.
Yeah, the actual closest one to me, very easy walking, is more properly called an INconvenience store. It has what looks like a surprisingly large assortment of overpriced food, but never again after I saw green bacon. They clearly make their money from the twin scourges of lottery and smoking. Then it comes down to the full sized grocery has much better hours, prices, selection, even if I usually drive there
One of the grocery chains in our region actually tried a real NYC style bodega, and it was a fantastic addition to the community. Unfortunately it never quite caught on and was killed by COViD.
It’s worse: they don’t want anything next to their homes that might be associated with working class because it would lower the price of houses.
They are probably carbarians whose only conception of a grocery store is a supermarket surrounded by a moat of parking. I wouldn’t want one of those next to me either
Even then, 15 minutes is quite a radius. I wouldn’t want to be a 3-minute walk away, but a 15 minute walk is like ~8 blocks.
Granted, that probably necessitates other homes being a lot closer than 8 blocks, so I suppose this just becomes a micro-scale NIMBY-ism. So I suppose you’re probably right.
That said, there are lots of places where you have massive grocery stores at the ground level or underground in high-density urban environments, so you can get massive scale with high walkability, if you’re willing to move past single-family homes (which we must… I say despite wanting a single-family home for my family.)
Not wanting a parking lot moat next to them is one thing, but not even wanting one within a mile and a half just flat-out doesn’t make sense.
But what if your only experience with grocery/retail/bar s these huge loud noxious monstrosities. We’ve super-sized almost everything, and many people probably have no idea it can be different
Some people don’t want anyone near them. Not even a small mom-and-pop grocery store.
Absolutely. I imagine there would be a significant correlation between those who want to live in an urban area vs a rural area and what they want within 15 minutes.
@jeffhykin @ajsadauskas My brother and his neighbors are fighting a grocery store in their neighborhood because of “traffic” (it would be negligible). Instead they drive 10 minutes each way thru - traffic.
Car brain - wanting your neighborhood to be undesirable so people won’t want to come.
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars One thing you can get within a 15 minute walk of some US homes is arrested!
(My grandma went for a walk in a Miami suburb. The locals thought that someone walking (rather than driving) was obviously suspicious so they called the cops. Because my grandma was white and female and elderly, rather than black and male and young, they stopped to talk to her rather than just shooting her. They then spent several minutes trying to get her to admit that she was walking because her car had broken down - they just couldn’t get it through their heads that she was walking because she wanted to walk.)
They saw an elderly woman walking on the street, and they didn’t shoot her on sight?
I hope those officers were fired on the spot for not following standard protocol!
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@Zugumba @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars On my one trip to Texas my host said we were going out to dinner. So at the hotel we got into a car, were driven out of the hotel car park, up the ramp onto the motorway, along for one junction, down the ramp, and into the restaurant car park.
And when I looked around I could see that the hotel was in fact next door. Each was surrounded by a vast nearly empty car par. We could have walked from one to the other … except of course there was an impenetrable fence between the two car parks. 'cos nobody would want to walk, would they, when they could drive, so why leave a gap in the fence?
And then … there were all sorts of weird hoops to jump through before we were allowed to buy alcohol to go with our dinner. Of course if we’d been able to walk from the hotel we could have drunk as much as we liked without worrying about being sober enough to drive back.
I used to live in South Carolina and recently moved to Chicago. Despite there being many more police in Chicago, I’ve actually had less of a feeling of police anxiety because I don’t drive here. The cops are on the roads pulling cars over. They aren’t in alleys and side streets following pedestrians (at the same rates, anyways). If walking and cycling are normal and built for, police are less of a problem, imo.
Do the 32 percent not know what a bus stop is?? Why would you want a bus stop farther than 15 minutes away???
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars if I make it a 20 min radius, then it’s everything except sports arena and university, and there are multiples of both not much further than that.
If I keep it strictly to 15 mins, all I lose is the shopping mall and movie theatre.
I live where I live very much because I can have a walkable (slash cyclable slash public transportable) life.
Why do you need a gas station in walking distance?
@ajsadauskas
And the amount of grocery stores i can reach within a 15 minutes walk must be at least 80, easily.
This town is still structured around small family businesses.
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@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars I’m kind of sad that “cafe”, “bookstore”, and “library” aren’t even on this list at all. 😢
I would honestly have to do a web search to find out where the nearest elementary school, day care, and gas station are, but I’d be stunned if I didn’t have those within 15 minutes. As it is, I do have everything else, including a university and a sports arena, and *two* malls. (I’m in between the Barclays Center and Long Island University in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NYC.)
Imagine if that gas station ⛽ could also be a kindergarten 😁! Your neighborhood would totally rock!
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars I can get to a gas station.
OK, maybe to a park if you don’t require it to have playground equipment 🙂
How is bar so low?? Do people want drunk drivers? Because that’s how you get drunk drivers
40% do not think an elementary school should be within a 15 minute walk?!?!? (16 not sure 24 no)
That’s wild.
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The fact that it’s called a gas station rather than convenience store on a survey about walking is somewhat disappointing.
