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You could take a train to the shop, though. If the infrastructure is built right.
The fact people want to get in a car in order to get groceries is beyond me. I’m in Australia, where car brain is also very prevalent, but with many urban places good for walking and PT.
I live close to the shops, and go there multiple times a week because it’s literally right there. Driving and parking? Nah, I’m good.
I live in Houston. We have a grocery store in town that has a big apartment block over the top of it. A friend lives there and he jokes that he’s taking the elevator to the grocery store any time I complain about traffic or parking.
Unfortunately, living in a posh apartment that’s conveniently placed over a nice grocery store means the price of rent is astronomical. So he needs to work as a highly paid attorney in the oil industry to afford to live in a place where he doesn’t need to use a car to get groceries.
Well good on him at least for copping the first adopters price haha, hopefully you can put some stuff back where the city bulldozed to put carparks one day 😅 one apartment at time
The ironic (Or perhaps just interesting) thing is that apartments are supposed to be cheaper living because you don’t have a front or back yard.
It’s vaguely that here, if location is the same apartment is usually cheaper than a free standing house, but apartments are usually better located near public transport and amenities (the whole point), so there’s a slight premium for that.
The American description of apartments almost always coming along in the phrase “luxury condos” is perplexing (other than NYC, it seems)
In fairness, in Melbourne we also do not build many apartments. Far fewer than we should, mostly due to regulations and laws not being airtight around owners corporations, aka body corp, and conflicts of interest where the developer awards a building management contract before selling all the apartments… So people are a bit hesitant to sign up for that and apartment living is still a pretty foreign concept to most
The ironic (Or perhaps just interesting) thing is that apartments are supposed to be cheaper living because you don’t have a front or back yard.
They tend to be more expensive per sqft but smaller than a house you could buy. And there’s no mortgage, so you don’t need a big down payment to move in.
But apartment living in a private system means enriching a landlord first and foremost. That means whatever the actual cost of the space, you’re going to pay extra.
The American description of apartments almost always coming along in the phrase “luxury condos” is perplexing (other than NYC, it seems)
It’s just a marketing gimmick. The term doesn’t have any legal meaning, so everyone uses it to upsell their units.
Some of the dingest places I’ve lived have been billed as “luxury”.
And there’s no mortgage, so you don’t need a big down payment to move in.
I am not quite following you here. What do you mean there’s no mortgage? (Other than if you have the cash, and thus don’t need a loan)
What do you mean there’s no mortgage?
Most people don’t buy a home outright. They take out a long-term low-interest loan (mortgage literally means “pledge till death” although they typically only last 15-30 years) to pay back the house in installments. However, before you can take out this loan, banks will often demand a down payment equal to 20% of the total value of the property. With the high price of housing, this down payment can be substantial - a $500k house requires a $100k down payment.
Renters don’t need to make these large advanced payments in order to get access to a rental unit. You aren’t required to have $100k in the bank before you get your own place.
Ah, you did not mention the renter part haha, I was considering how much each costs to buy
Friends I have talk about ordering groceries so casually. I go onto these apps and see a 20% markup with delivery fees and I’m like what the fuck.
American problems
Yeah there’s this thing called LIGHT RAIL, but even heavy rail, the NYC subway and BART are actually both heavy rail transit systems that one could absolutely casually take to the grocery store.
Their real issue is they think they have to travel 20+KM to the closest Walmart every time they want to buy something.
Ideally we could just fucking walk to a small grocery store instead of having to drive to one. Also would increase jobs with more foot traffic.
Most Americans lost one or both of their feet to the diabeetus
Don’t forget polio, due to anti-vaxxers, it’s making a comeback!
We pay extra to send our kids to a school where all Vax need to be up to date and it’s actually verified. Fucked up its come to this.
as a Dutchy, this confuses me greatly
Trains solve traffic issues
Elon brings shame to autists everywhere by not knowing about trains
Gregory does not have enough trains in his neighbourhood
Elon brings shame to autists everywhere by not knowing about trains
Elon’s not actually autistic. He’s just terminally online and regularly high off his gord. Once he sobers up, he does a masterful job of rooking WASPs out of their retirement accounts and state treasuries out of their tax monies by doing his best Music Man impression.
yeah, the Netherlands is so nice with that, you bike to a station for 10 minutes and then its a 2 hour train ride to go anywhere in the country
If you are not disabled in anyway and still need to take a transport bigger than a bicycle to buy basic groceries, the design of the city you live in is fundamentally broken.
As a disabled person, thanks for remembering us. I’ll see these “just hop on your bike and pedal over!” comments and it’s kinda saddening.
There are disabled people in the Netherlands too. And they can move around the city in micro cars, mobility scooters, electric wheelchairs, etc… with confidence, because bike lanes network allows them to go anywhere, with way more autonomy and safety than in any other country.
That sounds great, but I suspect The Netherlands wouldn’t welcome me with open arms. Until then, I’m stuck in 'Murica.
I suspect The Netherlands wouldn’t welcome me with open arms
Because you’re disabled? Or because you’ve got an unseasonal tan or low-income?
From my experience, the EU is enormously accepting and encouraging of rich white migrants, regardless of their mobility status.
honestly, that’s worth the try :D But of course, it’s easy to always show the exception and ask “why aren’t you all doing the same?”. Decades of car centric politics will not be fixed easily, not with techbros reinventing trains, not in today’s 'Murica. It’s a shame, though, because there was a great streetcars infrastructure a century ago… maybe that’s the one thing America should bring back to be great again
I get her point but trams!!!
I think she should see a city with trams and see how useful it is when implemented properly :)))
trams are the train’s cute younger sibling :)
Taking a train to the grocery store only seems absurd to people who have never experienced a really efficient rail system.
You get what you pay for.
I used to take the train to the grocery store. It was called the red line in Chicago
In Tokyo I’d hop on the subway regularly to shop. Not a big deal at all.
The only thing that was different was that you don’t buy two weeks of groceries at once.
This was something that used to put me on the pro-car side; if it takes me multiple trips just to get all my groceries from my car into the house, lugging all of that on a bus or a bike would be a nightmare!
But then I saw content from people like Not Just Bikes, and saw how people in places with good public transit actually live, and it hit me like a ton of bricks that if shopping was more convenient, I wouldn’t need to buy a week’s worth of groceries in one trip. I could just swing by a corner store for what I need that night or the next morning, and one or two bags are easy to handle on a train or even a bicycle.
Introducing:the tramway!
Wait until they hear about the Bus. But probably is for the best they don’t, their head would explode at the thought
Bro, I can walk 1 mile to the grocery store and 1 mile back. That’s roughly an hour including shopping. I have a disability on my right foot so I’m slow moving.
I can walk 1/2 a mile to the bus stop and spend another 20-30 min to the store, so around 2 or more hours.
I can drive there in 5 minutes.
Cars are not the solution and are terrible for the environment but many people don’t have other options
Ok, but imagine this: you work a mile or two from your house, with bus stops every two blocks, and they come every 5 minutes. That walk to your house passes a grocery store, several bakeries, a small hardware store, and most other places you’d need to go day to day. On one side of this main Street is a park, on the other is a few blocks of homes and businesses before you get to a parking garage next to the highway - all the roads inside the community have low speed limits and little parking, so there’s not much traffic.
If you qualify for handicap placards you can park on the street, a few parking passes can do the same, but are hard to get because they’re auctioned off. Most people leave their cars in the parking garage if they don’t need them, they might park near their building to unload large amounts of stuff, but after they take it back to the lot. People at the stores in the community don’t generally buy more than will fit in a personal cart or a backpack, because they’re so close and convenient
It’s actually way more convenient, because you don’t have parking lots everywhere. Instead stores, offices, and housing of all levels of affordability is all mixed together, so you just give priority to people who can’t walk far, and everyone else just has a couple staircases or a couple blocks further to go
And it’s not just a dream, I spent a summer living in a place that worked exactly like this
I would love that! Unfortunately that’s not the reality I live in.
There is so much that could be done to make that a future and I am all for it
Imagine if you lived somewhere that your disability would be considered and accommodated for, so you were given an electric mobility scooter or other, more sensible and less dangerous transport for those one mile situations…
Your problem is with infrastructure
It should be designed for people who can’t drive
Generally those physically capable of driving are better off not driving than those who physically can’t drive
A mile on a bike should take about 5 minutes too.
This dude jokes but when I lived in Harlem I’d take the subway to Columbus circle Whole Foods as it was significantly easier than commuting to the east side on 125 to pathmark.
Greg is gonna shit on the floor when he’ll learn that happens everywhere in Europe.
In socialist Europe, I walk to the groceries, comrade… I take 15min train ride from home to work in the city center… and I wait no longer than 5 minutes on train because that’s its frequency… but I have no car…
Damn it must suck to live in such terrible conditions
Don’t a decent amount of European businesses even do delivery in back by train?
People really need to commute for groceries? Like, I have the store 1 block away. Americans don’t know they can walk?
I usually stop at a grocery store on my commute, but if I just need something real quick I just walk to one of the three grocery stores down the street, but loading up the car on the way home is just much easier
The closest (and not my preferred because it’s kind of expensive) grocery store would be a 2 hr round trip walking distance from me
That’s just fucked up, I’m so sorry.
Most Americans leave too far away from any supermarket, even if there were roads that could take you there, either by walking or cycling.
I say it’s a business opportunity, why don’t Americans just open a small general store in their residential areas? Not everything need to come from a supermarket, here we have people that literally sell you vegetables in a rented garage.
Seems like the only acceptable usage of garages for you people are tech startups and maybe teenager bands lol.
I hope the answer is not “due to some obtuse regulation, residential areas can’t have business operating in any shape or form, unless is a tech startup or an ice cream truck”.
I want to also mention that smaller grocery stores used to exist but Walmart effectively outed them
https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/1bpbgia/how_bad_did_stores_like_walmart_kill_small/
It’s not obtuse regulation, it’s explicitly by design. In most places in the US, you cannot operate a business in a residential area that serves the public. Businesses that do not do serve the public (like a tech startup or someone working from home) are fine. Ice cream trucks are also not allowed unless you have a proper business license / permit.
That laws sounds exactly like obtuse regulation to me. Why you cannot have a grocery store in your neighborhood? I really can’t think of a good reason. If there is a case for ice cream trucks, proper business license/permit and all that, it makes even less sense for other business types.
C’mon, you really need to commute to the supermarket to buy some bananas? That’s nonsense.
C’mon, you really need to commute to the supermarket to buy some bananas?
In the US our culture has mostly adapted the grocery store routine to our car culture. The typical trip to the grocery store involves filling a large shopping cart with all the family’s food for the next week or two. People get in the car and drive a far distance to a big grocery store that sells everything. They buy more than they could ever carry, and they load it all into the car.
Also exacerbating this is how much we love shitty processed food. The big grocery stores have nice produce sections, but 80% of what’s in the store is shelf stable and in a box.
As an American that wishes for having stores just that close, the zoning laws are like that for a reason. That reason is to keep people dependent on cars. That is good for the fossil fuel industry.
I know it’s nonsense. A fair amount of people know it’s nonsense. But also a lot of people don’t know, because they can’t imagine a life without cars (or a life where you don’t need to drive to do every mundane task). They only know no car = no job, food, or socialization and they will fight hard to guard it.
Zoning laws and NIMBYs
I watched a video about the topic some time ago, it sheds some light upon the stuff
Well if they leave so far why don’t they return?
slow clap
I live in the U.S. (for less than one more week now!) and currently, the closest place for me to buy groceries is five miles down a four lane highway. No sidewalks, obviously. You would be safe from cars walking on the median, less safe from poison ivy, ticks and lime disease since they don’t exactly care about keeping them well-mowed in the summer.
I can already see that things will be different in the place where we will be temporarily living in the UK (Blackburn).
Food deserts are a thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
They impact millions of people.
Yeah, it’s fucked up.
TIL
Light rail. All the time. Train isn’t only Amtrak.
What if trains weren’t slow? 🤔
Wdym? In what clown world are trains slow?
Amtrak has entered the chat
They are slower than driving except in peak traffic. Caltrain san Francisco to san Jose is about 2x driving time, and on neither end does the train get you into real downtown. San Jose is close but still a 15 minute walk before you get to anything interesting. Francisco is in a relatively shady area near a stadium, also 15 mins from market.
If you don’t have to park, getting to the airport by transit involves switching from Caltrain to BART at a random suburb so as an example San Jose to SFO is 30 mins by car, 1:30 by train. Note the tracks for the Caltrain and Bart are parallel here.
Ah, American trains. Outside of the USA and Canada, trains are fast.
If you mean to say “trains with high average speeds have high average speeds” I’ll agree, but even in countries trying to get faster average speeds it’s still relatively new outside of Japan.
There’s also cost to consider. You can get a fast train Paris to Berlin and it’s 4 hours faster than driving, but costs more than 4x to transport 1 passenger vs a car which can bring 5. The main route is slow, matching the speed of a car. (If you had a family, would you pay 60 euros to drive, 520 euros to train at car speeds, or 932 euros to train faster?)
However the “fast” train is still only reaching normal highway speeds (120-130 kmph) on average…it’s just the roads are so bad google is estimating an average car speed of less than 80 kmph which is essentially like…suburb/business area street speed here in this country.
is the paris-berlin route really that slow?
vienna-munich travels at around 200 km/h…
Train should take the German highway to go faster
I’m cheating slightly because I’m considering distance in terms of the direct train. The other is faster but goes another few hundred km wayyyy out of the way so I’m considering that to be the average speed for comparison purposes.
The other fatal flaw in the analysis is that while gas (actually I used VW+diesel) is pretty flat rate, trains can be cheaper off-peak. But I was mostly looking to confirm that the general economics aren’t that different.
Where the us is real dumb is we actually have a shitton of space. Like the whole LA-SF train if we built it would be literally just next to i-5 in the middle of a redneck wasteland…plenty of space to get up to speed, and pretty much no reason to stop between sf and la. But we don’t do it because we suck.
The US
"Oh no! Trust me. Free market capitalism is gonna bring us so much innovation! "
- brings you broken infrastructure
- slow trains
If I wanted to take the train from my city to NYC, I’d end up spending about as much as a flight and I’d be on the trip for about 34 hours.
Freedom! Prestige!
Me watching the cars crawling on the highway at 120 km/h when I zip by at 330 km/h in my comfortable TGV seat, playing on my Steam Deck.
Playing online on the steam deck even
The future is now
THE LAAAAAAAND OF THE FREEEEEEE! 🇺🇸🦅🛻🔫
What if they didn’t have to run on tracks either? And then there could be smaller personal sized versions that families could own too!
why the fuck would any family want to own their own trolleybus
I beg these people to imagine a world where you don’t need to get in a vehicle to buy essentials.
Imagine? You mean remember? Like, surely, their ancestor’s memories to such but, yeah.
