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.
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
I’ve noticed it’s less common in the city and more common in rural areas. I live in SF and people here don’t call them gas stations unless they have gas, but in the Central Valley this is extremely common.
I grew up there and I always forget how much more “proper” I speak at home vs where I grew up. My partner sometimes struggles to understand what I’m trying to say a lot of the time when I slip back into it when speaking with my family. Gas station is just one of the many overly generic terms. Another one is “Vallarta” which doesn’t necessarily mean the chain grocery store Vallarta, but a Mexican grocery store usually selling produce and with a meat counter.
I definitely don’t refer to it as a gas station if there’s no gas, but… I may very well refer to the convenience store attached to the gas station as a “gas station”. Like “I’m gonna stop at a gas station and get some coffee”, even if I mean any convenience store, gas or no.
It’s like a rectangle-square situation
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”.
Significantly diminished?
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
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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).
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
Where are they going to have AA meetings? that’s the bigger concern. the only thing on the list that functions as a community center is the elementary school and park.
Maybe they want to drink at home
@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.
@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.)
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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.
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!
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.
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.
How is bar so low?? Do people want drunk drivers? Because that’s how you get drunk drivers
Who needs a gas station within walking distance? One need a gas station within 15-minutes driving.
I wonder what the meaning of “should not” is in this survey. A restaurant “should not” be withing 15 minutes of my home, as in “I don’t want any restaurants near me” or is it “It’s not important enough to be in the local government’s target list”?
I don’t understand the red bars the way the question is phrased now. Why wouldn’t you want a park near you?
If they used the phrase “15 minute neighborhood” during polling then a portion of the no’s are probably from people who have had it turned into a trigger word for them by conservative talk media.
Yeah that’s what I’m assuming the 16% who don’t even want a grocery store near them is. That sets your baseline.
“If your local government did adopt…”
I bet 16% don’t want “the government” to anything.
That said, people in my neighborhood are strongly against sidewalks. Something about bringing the problems of the big city to us. (I presume crime, but it could be anything.)
“It’s not important enough to be in the local government’s target list”
I think this is the correct interpretation given the exact wording of the question.
Gas station above elementary school?
Why do you need a gas station in walking distance?
Do the 32 percent not know what a bus stop is?? Why would you want a bus stop farther than 15 minutes away???
Am I the only one impressed 16% of people dont want a grocery store nearby?
@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.)
I do not understand why you would want to walk to a gas station.
Makes you wonder how many people actually understood the question.
Also, you have to realize the obesity problem isn’t just a function of our diet, many people can’t imagine walking fifteen minutes no matter what.
Everyone answering that they understand it to mean “convenience store” is missing out on standalone convenience stores….
But what about a “garage”, that traditionally used to be at gas stations as well. I find it very convenient that when my car needs servicing, I can drop it off and walk home. Yes, I also need a car and that shouldn’t contradict walkability
Snacks
Tbf, 24/7 kiosks are even better than that
Wouldn’t a grocery store cover that use case?
Grocery stores typically have normal working hours. Petrol stations could be thought of to work 24 hours. Also ducking into a small kiosk for a snack is less of a hassle than a grocery store.
Who doesn’t run out of gas in your own home, every now and again?
Most gas stations here have convenience stores attached and they’re typically 24 hr. It’s a common gathering place for night owls and degens lol. I’ve spent a lot of time at gas stations just hanging out with friends or the cashier after getting off work at 3am. Drink a couple tall boys, chain smoke, shoot the shit and unwind a bit before heading home. It’s nice
Pretty bizarre results. Park and bus stop should be 100.
University, hospital, mall, theatre, arena? Those are massive, you can’t have one 15 minute walk from everywhere.
Now bars are the one commercial item that’s easy to have around.
Im confused about (from the poll)
- bar… if this is not walkable you are promoting drunk driving. (even if its not your thing)
- what do you need to walk to the gas station for? or is this being used also as a corner store?
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars I wonder why they included gas stations unless it’s for their use as convenience store. Buying gas as a pedestrian is a very marginal use case…
How else will you burn the cars?
I don’t think lawn mowers, snow blowers, and other ICE landscaping tools, are “very marginal use cases”. Sure they might not use a lot of gas, but most everyone with a lawn/driveway has them (at least mower and blower).
But also, yes, it’s a convenience store. Other than maybe in cities, we often don’t have any convenience stores at all, just gas stations with shops inside.
I’m in my 20s and only once have I ever used a lawn mower that required fuel, and it was pretty old. Unless you’re living on a huge tract of land and need a ride-on one, an electric one with a long cord will do the job 99% of the time.
I’ve never seen a snow blower but I can only imagine it being useful to people living in areas that get a crazy amount of snowfall, otherwise it’s overkill.
Besides a lawn mower, there’s not really any large powered landscaping tools I can think of that the average person would ever need to outright buy and own.
lawl, nobody here has electric mowers. You can’t even find them in retail stores most of the time. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but just because you haven’t personally used one by your 20s doesn’t mean they aren’t damn near mandatory elsewhere.
I have one I bought online and it struggles to get through my tiny yard. It uses batteries, but same basic concept. The grass is just too dense in the area for them to be practical, unless you want to go over the whole thing twice every week. Some people do, and good for them, but the vast majority simply won’t.
And sure maybe a snowblower in the south is overkill, but around here (and frankly in a ton of areas) if you don’t have one people -feel sorry for you and offer to help- because we do get a lot in a typical year. But also useful for old people, those with physical problems, etc. shoveling snow is hard work, unless the most you ever get is a dusting.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that a person needs to own tools in order to use and need fuel for them. That’s just silly. I borrow tillers and shit from friends all the time and have to get gas for them. Don’t own them, but use them. Same if I were to rent shit from the hardware store. You have to refill them before return.
lawl, nobody here has electric mowers.
Most people near my dacha that have lawn mowers have electric one.
It uses batteries, but same basic concept. The grass is just too dense in the area for them to be practical, unless you want to go over the whole thing twice every week.
My can even cut some twigs. Got corded one.
Here in New England, my battery powered snow blower does pretty well, but then again we don’t really get much snow anymore
Why would you carry a lawn mower to the gas station?
You would carry a gas can
- A container of gas is heavy, and sloshing makes hard to carry. Would you really walk to get that?
- Battery powered lawncare equipment can probably serve most of us now, certainly most of us in a “walkable” neighborhood
- Do people even do their own yards anymore? Sometimes it seems like I’m the only one
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