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
Denver isn’t great with public transport either. There’s at least a minimal light rail system and buses go pretty much everywhere, so that’s the good part, but the city is so sprawled out that unless your destination is a direct route you’re looking at an hour or more to exclusively use public transport. And that’s really the main city. Start getting out into the expanded metro area and there’s not many choices except for a handful of spur rail or bus lines.
It’s a lot more than many American cities, especially on paper, but in practice it’s pretty rough to use as a primary transport.
Most bus systems in American cities are for people to get to work and back home. Trying to take it to, for instance, a friend’s house, and you’re generally going to spend about 4x the time it’d take to drive there.