"City" is an optimistic word for where I am compelled (by familial duty) to live. But, we need to plan for my density, too. Otherwise we'll still have millions of cars on the roads and they will need somewhere to park when they visit the city.
When I visit a real city, I don't mind paying for parking. I'd prefer not to have to pay for parking to get groceries each week, but that would probably be fine. But biking is not reasonable, and mass transit is unavailable.
Well, there are a lot of reasons, I suppose. It's hard to name just one, but I guess because it isn't profitable to run a produce section any closer? That's not a root cause, and it's not something that reveals individually actionable items, but it's what I have. I'm not even sure there a collective action the 300 residents could take, other than funding a non-profitable community grocery store, maybe? But most of the residents are living below the poverty line, and the ones that aren't are either retired or otherwise uninterested in that kind of community action.
There's only 19k people in the whole county and 15mi. is the distance from where I live to the county seat.
I agree that urban planning should stop subsiding cars. But, America is, by land mass, not very urban, and I'm stuck in one of those areas.
If you think urban planning has anything to do this how I get to the grocery store, you aren't facing the problem.
The population density of the EU is 106/km^2^. The population density of my county is 22.4/mi^2^ (8.64/km^2^).
I'd be willing to take longer, but I wouldn't want to do the trip uncovered in the rain. Also, the highway doesn't have a shoulder in one section, so I'd have to route around that to be safe on the bike, and I don't know how much length that would add to the trip (and it would probably involve adding travel on unpaved / dirt / gravel roads...)
Sorry, my bad.
My father used to run the grocery store in town. My brother ran it for a bit, too. I don't know the ultimate reasons it ahut down, but Dad wanted to retire and brother decided it wasn't worth it to run.
There's a dollar store in town, and an another 5 min north, and another 10 mi. south, but no produce at any.
I want to move back to a more urban area and be able to walk to a grocery store in 15 minutes, but Dad needs someone to live with him since he is now disabled. (Brother died.)
I remember there was a problem getting wholesale deliveries at the small scale needed to serve this town of barely 300 people.
I don't dislike driving, but if I could fit my schedule around public transit, I think I'd prefer that, most of the time.
Yep. Passenger service stopped in my area before I was born, but my father remembers being able to use them that way.
Freight trains run through multiple times a day, still.
The "old train depot" meuseam / visitor's center is literally across the street from the grocery store w/ produce section.
I'm kinda in the middle. I think so far my balance is about the same as it was 1 year ago, so I lost at least a year worth of progress. The slide is probably not over, yet, tho.
Presidential. /s
Yes, I will cycle 15 miles (one-way) to the nearest produce section.
I'm all for bikes in sufficiently urban areas, but they are never going to be reasonable for 90% of America (by land mass, not population).
We need passenger train service (or other mass transit) that can cover lower density areas and still be reliable. (There's active train tracks within 100m of both my driveway and the produce section, so for me a passenger train would be ideal.)
I'm not trying to get groceries from a gigastore. This grocery store building has been there since I was a child in the 80s and while it is bigger than the store my father used to run, it's less than 20% the size of the WMT supercenter down the road -- half the size of the grocery section of that "gigastore" (it's not a max size supercenter). But, it is the closest produce section. You can be shelf-stable stuff from the dollar store(s) much closer, but I do sometimes need produce and I'd rather shop at this locally-owmed location than the chain dollar stores. (I don't even this they are franchises, just corporate owned.)