this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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I keep getting really confused reading comments like this, then remembering "Ah, yeah, probably an American who doesn't have a small supermarket with all the everyday stuff literally next door"
Sorry that I live in a state with a size as big as your county, and a city with a population as large as a lot of countries.
In order to get everything that close you'd have to stack people on top of each other in slums like the kowloon.
I would much rather drive a mile to the store than to live in a little box stacked on top of other people.
But I guess we should just tear down hundreds of cities like mine and start all over to make them bike friendly. ๐คฃ
Weird take.
No, you don't have to stack people at all. A small store with 2-3 employees servicing a neighbourhood would very easily be profitable and convenient. You'd need to walk 10 minutes instead of 30 seconds if people were more spread out, but much better than the US big box store surrounded by the parking moat.
Assuming you're talking about US suburbs, the only change would be some franchise buying a single house in a neighbourhood, bulldozing that and building a small store. That is, if it wasn't illegal to do that due to zoning laws.
I live in a neighbourhood with a mixture of apartment blocks, parks and stores. When I step outside my apartment block, I can either walk 30 seconds to the store, the park, the vet, etc. People who live down the road from me might need 5 minutes to get to those places as they're a bit farther away from our local store hub.
Of course big stores with much more variety and less commonly bought things exist, for that you do need some form of transport, even here. It's just not necessary to go there to buy pasta and sauce to cook for dinner, for example.