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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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I have lived in Seattle metro for a couple of years, and I am yet to encounter a location within it which is more than 15 minutes bicycle ride from a normal grocery store. I just tried to find one using Google Maps, and only places I can find are at the very edges of farthest exurbs.

My experience with suburbs is exactly the same as /u/TIRM . Ability to form social relationship with your neighbors, and for your kids to play outside with other kids is one of the things that’s attracting people to suburbs, not repelling them!

As token_progressive mentioned, there are wildly different "suburbs." Urbanist youtube channel NotJustBikes has a video praising a suburb of Toronto known as Riverdale: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&ab_channel=NotJustBikes

It differentiates between "streetcar suburbs" or similar, and "car-dependent suburbs" and explicitly states that suburbs are not inherently bad.

What about most normal suburbs, which were built way after streetcars left the living memory, and still allow kids to bike to a store?

This conversation is revolving around some archetypes, but why don’t we focus on a specific example? For example, let’s focus on DC metro mentioned by /u/ResoluteRaven. How far do we have to go from the White House to find a place that’s more than 15 minute bicycle ride to closest supermarket?

Why would anyone take a 15 minute bike ride to the closest supermarket? Walkable means there's a shop within 500 meters. Maybe it doesn't have everything, but a convenience store like the one Dante worked in in Clerks should work.

Using Manhattan distance means each shop covers a 500x500m square. With small plots of 200sqm this is at most 1250 single family homes. More realistically, it's 1000, with the rest occupied by roads, other public spaces and commerce.

According to this report on Statista, a C-store needs about 5000 transactions per week. I don't think this is achievable at this density if everyone walks, but a five-minute bike ride should make each C-store reachable by 4000 homes. Even if each domicile shops there only twice a week, this should already be 8000 transactions.

Why would anyone take a 15 minute bike ride to the closest supermarket?

The context of the discussion was kids living allegedly isolated lives in the suburbs. We don't expect kids to drive, but they very much can and should bike. Adults will, of course, just drive.

Walkable means there's a shop within 500 meters.

The actual definition is 1/2 mile (0.8 km).

Oh, thanks. That's more like 2500 SFHs (if the lots are small enough) in vicinity.

It definitely does not match my experience that most American suburbs allow kids to bike 15 minutes to a store. Like, it might be possible but it's not particularly safe, there's not usually infrastructure for it, etc.

DC is one of the least car-dependent places in the US. According to this, it has the lowest car ownership rate outside of the NYC metro area. The White House and immediately surrounding area is very bikeable, in my experience--it's right in the middle of the city! It seems like a weird choice to focus on. What about a city like Houston, LA, or Miami?

The neighborhood around Walt Whitman High School in Maryland (which has been in the news lately for other culture war related reasons) is around 8 miles from the White House and looks to be about a 15 minute bike ride from the nearest grocery store, maybe longer if you lived to the north or west.

I'd say from looking at the intersections that need to be traversed and knowing the poor quality of the local drivers that the helicopter parents in such a wealthy neighborhood would never let their kids make that particular journey, but that of course has no direct bearing on your question.

If you're looking for the closest places to the White House without nearby grocery stores (as opposed to convenience stores), you want to go the other way down Pennsylvania Ave.

The place I described is in the DC metro area and could plausibly be called a "far exurb." I make no claims as to whether this is a typical suburban experience because I have no idea, only that the type of place that YIMBY's complain so vociferously about does in fact exist somewhere.

Sure, I don’t dispute that places like that exist, but if the argument is “some far exurbs are too remote for kids to even bike to the store”, then it is much different than claiming that this is a typical suburban experience, that it is hell for kids, and we need to change zoning rules across the board to fix it.

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