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Driverless cars were the future but now the truth is out: they’re on the road to nowhere
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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You don't have to get a week's worth of groceries when you don't live in a car-first dystopia.
You walk five minutes to the store, spend 5-10 minutes grabbing stuff, then walk back with like a single bag. You shouldn't even need to get on public transit for basics like groceries, but even if you do a single bag isn't a problem.
How many people live a 5 minute walk from a grocery store? I think the closest one to me is about 5 miles away in a city of 250k+. That'd be like a 4 hour round trip walk on average.
That's part of what we want to change. I live a 3 min walk from the grocery store and it's fucking glorious. Better designed cities are better for everyone.
My main problem with this line of thinking is that our cities already exist as they are, and it would take Herculean effort from the government, citizens, and companies in order to raze and rebuild them in a more ideal way.
My city passed mixed use zoning to tackle exactly this years ago and nothing has changed.
Where do you live that has grocery so far apart? Are you actually in the city or like a suburb of it?
I'm in Brooklyn. I can't speak to all of Brooklyn but this neighborhood has a population of 100k from Wikipedia. Where my friend used to live wikipedia says is about 120k, and they had good walkable options.
I live on the west coast where cities aren't as dense as the boroughs of NYC or most eastern states.
Ah. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I don't want to live there. Too sprawled out.
That is an incredibly large amount of time over the week spent doing this task; literally hours per week if we are talking 5 min walk each way plus 10 min in store every day. This is much longer than condensing the 7 trips into 1 and buying in bulk. And it still doesn't solve the having to go outside in cold and wet weather. Not to mention any grocery store this close is going to be at bodega prices, so we are talking spending more money as well.
This isn't a solution. This is a way to spend even more time and even more money while one has to be outside hauling stuff in the cold and wet weather.
You don't have to go every day. You can also take a hand cart if you really want to stock up. It's also just much less of an ordeal to walk down the street and grab some things than it is to deal with the car, traffic, parking, gas.
You have to go outside in the cold weather when you drive, too. Plus you're more likely to get in an accident if it's very rainy or icy. Not a compelling argument.
Foot traffic is also better for the neighborhood in terms of economic and social health (see: Death & Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs).
I live within walking distance of several large supermarkets, in addition to bodegas and smaller groceries. I don't live in a fancy or expensive neighborhood. I don't know why you think that there would only be expensive places near where people live.
Also even if it was spending more money on food because you only live next to an expensive bodega, you're ignoring the huge externalized costs of car-first culture. Pollution, pedestrian deaths, opportunity cost from lack of walking, economic loss from lack of foot traffic, safety loss from lack of foot traffic, and so on.