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Depends on location, but I don’t think I’m too bad.
it takes half an hour to walk (one-way) to the nearest store
about 20 minutes to the grocery store, 5 to the convenience store, about 10 to the bus stop 20 to the park. West coast.
I'll chime in since I'm in Canada, which is sadly just US delayed by 20 years.
I can walk to a convenience store with high prices in about 5 minutes or 360 metres and little else. It's all residential beyond there until a 25 minute walk or greater and everything is spread out. The main shopping centres you might want to walk around are an hour walk away. To reach the store I actually shop at for reasonable prices, it's a 12 minute drive or a 7400 metre walk (a miserable one with spotty sidewalks)... just for fun, it's about 45m by bus BEST CASE but realistically you will take an hour unless you hit the exact right bus at the exact moment it pulls up.
But that varies.
Here it's < 100m to the food shopping, pharmacy, post office, Amazon pickup, pros like dentist and barber and a hospital, separate medical test office, some medical specialists, as well as two gyms and a daycare. Hopping the train gets me to one of two biiig malls in about 5 or 20 min. 200m out is a plethora of doctors and specialists, 2 coffee/snack shops, and 2 of the 5 pizza places nearby. Go the km and you'll pass the Starbucks, sandwiches, park, church, more takeout, and 7-11.
We're designed for no-car though. Inasmuch as many Canadian cities still need a car, and while I'm cheating by working 100% remote since CoViD, I haven't driven a car in about a year. This is a special island of accessibility, which they're trying to put around all the train stations and experiment with more walking.
But distances are still crazy for visitors. People land in Toronto and ask "can we take a day trip to Banff?" Not realizing it could be 71 hours of driving to get there.
Travelling to see my family via ferry is a 5-6 hour 100km trip if I optimize it, since it's so inefficient. airplanes cost as much as 120 Starbucks medium frothy hot drinks for the 50km air portion of the trip round-trip, per person, so we avoid that option.
Our little pet island on the west coast, for instance, where we have some quaint buildings and such, is almost 500km long -- which could be the distance almost from dover to Scotland if I believe my AI pothead.
This land mass is huge. You have no idea.
Depends where you live.
In a city? 75% of everything I need is right across the street.
In a rural town? Before I moved to the city, I had to drive 30-45 miles away to do literally anything. There were busses, but they only came around once in the morning and once more in the evening. And they didn't always go where you wanted directly, so you'd have to spend like an entire day just to get to a place.
Nearest big landmark everyone might recognize is the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. And thats 78 miles away in a straight line.
Edit: To put things in terms non-Americans may understand better - We tend to measure distances not in the unit of distance, but in the time it takes to get somewhere. Assuming there is no traffic, the Golden Gate Bridge would only be an hour away taking the freeway. But that's never gonna happen; the traffic through the Altamonte Pass alone is gonna add 1-2 hours depending on the time of day.
Nearest convenience store is 200m Chain supermarket is 200m Bus stop is 150m Library is 50m Park is 500m Train station is 800m
NYC makes everything easy
Highly dependent on where you live. Some places are very sparse, others are pretty dense.
I've personally lived in places where the closest convenience store was 2.25 km, and the grocery store was nearly 18km, as well as places where a convenience store was literally a part of my building, and grocery stores were walkable distances.
The U.S. is enormous and varied. Take a look at truesizeof and compare the U.S. and Europe (don't forget to add Alaska and Hawaii - they won't be included in the contiguous states). Consider how different London is from rural Romania.
Having a small market so close is a massive improvement from my previous address, where the only option was a big supermarket 3.9km away.
One thing that deserves special note is the US, aside from being more spread out in general, has a lot more sprawling suburbs with downtown areas.....if you live near the downtown, then everything is walkable, but maybe 20% of a towns population in any given suburb will be that close, and thats a generous estimate.
As an American who has lived in the EU, walking / biking like you can do there just plain is not possible for MOST of the US. As other have mentioned, if you live in a major city, or in the center of a suburb, then it may not be so bad.
On a similar note, this sprawl is the same reason that public transport on the EUs level isnt viable in the US....there would need to be too many stops and too many routes to get decent coverage, and when you math it out, having cars is the most economical decision for most of the country.
I live in NYC. It's one of the few large places in the US that's dense and not completely car focused.
Convenience store: 5 minute walk to several
Supermarket: several within 10 minute walk
Pharmacy: several within 10 minutes on foot
Library: I think there's two within 10-15 minutes walking
Restaurants: several within 10 minutes on foot
Subway: about 5 minute walk. There's also a bus stop there.
Very large park: 15 minutes or so
I never want to live somewhere where I need a car again. Someone I was talking to at a party the other day was like "I love having my car it's so much freedom" and I'm like aside from needing to fuel, maintain, insure, and store it I guess.
Walking distance is only part of this equation.
We have no sidewalks and I would need to cross a 6 lane interstate if I were to go to the "closest" anything.
So first of all, the US is big and diverse, if you hop in a car and drive from New York to LA without stopping, taking the fastest route, mostly on major highways, averaging out to something like 60+mph (about 100 km/h) you're still going to be spending just about 2 days in the car.
And in between, you're going to see a little bit of everything, mountain, plains, forest, farms, huge dense urban cities, towns small enough you can barely even call them a town, suburban sprawl, massive industrial facilities, you name it you're going to see it.
Overall, if you live in an urban area, the situation may not be too bad, cities are somewhat walkable, there's public transportation that will usually get you fairly close to where you need to go, there may even be protected bike lanes, etc. although the situation will vary wildly from one city to another.
It will even vary from one part of the city to another. You can have large sections of the city where there's no real grocery stores or other places to get your basic necessities, and you're pretty much limited to whatever you can get from corner stores, bodegas, convenience stores, etc. (mostly pre-packaged and processed foods, and if you're lucky maybe a couple pieces of fresh fruit) and if you want anything more than that you're probably looking at taking a few hours out of your day to walk a significant distance to a store or take public transit that may not go exactly where you need it, may be slow, expensive, or just a pain in the ass to deal with, etc.
Getting out into the suburbs, it's again kind of a crapshoot. There are some walkable suburbs, with wonderful shopping options, there's some that are a maze of residential developments and gated communities that come off of major roads with no sidewalks or even shoulders worth speaking of and you're taking a significant gamble trying to walk anywhere from there. There may be little or no public transportation and if there is it may not be going anywhere you need to go, or be convenient to get onto
Personally, I live towards the rural end of the suburbs, about an hour or less from a major city depending on traffic.
Damn near everything I could ever want or need is within about a half hour drive, and most of I commonly need is covered within about 15 minutes.
If I don't have a car though, my options drop off significantly. I'm looking at an hour walk one way to get to a grocery store, mostly along a long winding road with little or no shoulder and few streetlights. The only things I would really feel safe to walk to are 2 pizza shops, a small hardware store, a bar, a CVS, and gas station/convenience store, those last 2 are going to be about a half hour or longer walk, and along that winding road, but it's a stretch that at least has a half decent shoulder and some lawns to walk on for most of the way.
If you have a bike, there's a decent bike trail that will get you to some more shopping options, but it's about an hour's ride one way.
If you need to catch public transit, you'd have to walk about 2 hours to catch a bus, that line basically runs straight up and down a main road between the city and a larger, urban-ish town further out in the suburbs. There's not many options to transfer to anywhere else along the way but there's a lot along that route so if you can get to that bus most of your needs will be covered, but it doesn't run super frequently and it's not going to get you anywhere in a hurry.
Getting out into rural America, you have some small towns that are functionally self-contained, with their own grocery stores and other shopping options in-town within walking distance. Your options are limited but for the most part everything you really need is right there in town.
If you don't work in town though, and often people in these areas don't, they may be involved in farming, logging, oil/natural gas, construction, etc. and may work many miles from town, you're pretty much screwed if you don't have a car, or at least can count on carpooling with a coworker.
There's other small towns where there just isn't much of anything at all, maybe they have a gas station and a liquor store, and if you need anything else you're SOL, in some cases you may be looking at an hour or more drive to get to anything else so you can forget about walking.
Regardless of where/what kind of area you find yourself in, transportation between cities is often going to be an issue. You can probably catch a Greyhound bus or maybe Amtrak or similar between most major cities, though you may have to get a little creative with figuring out your route, but if you're trying to get to the smaller towns in between you may not have much luck.
There are, of course, nearly as many exceptions and special cases to everything I said as there are individual towns and cities.
Distance isn't the only factor to consider. The infrastructure is also very important for determining if a short distance is walkable.
This YouTube channel has lots of great info on the topic https://youtube.com/notjustbikes and this video in particular demonstrations that not even all short distances are necessarily walkable in the US https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54 @ 4:30 he begins to show a 800m walk in Houston from his hotel to a store.
Corner store with basics: 5 min Supermarket: 15 min Restaurants: 5 min Park: 3 min Bus stop: 5 min Library: 15 min Local rail: 20 min Regional/National rail: 40 min
All walking distances. I live in a neighborhood that was designed before cars existed so it’s more like Europe in terms of distances/amenities. Except our transit infrastructure is shit.
It depends what region your in.
City: depends where you live, i.e. how close to "downtown" you are. A lot of stuff is walking distance, but not everything. You could walk to school and get some basic food or a pharmacy. Probably need a car/bus for work or larger grocery trips.
Suberbs/town, you might be able to walk to convince store or to school/library, everything else is going to be a car or about a 30min walk. That being said, sometimes you're "deep" in the suberb and the nearest convince store is a 20-40 min walk.
Rual/farm: you need a a car to visit your neighbors. Nearest grocrey is a 30 min drive away.
Here are my best guesses from living life:
From house to local stores: City-Couple blocks Suburbs-3 to 10 mins Rural-10 to 45 mins
Metropolitan centers are surrounded by Suburbs which is surrounded by rural. That's sort of stat quo. The distance between Metropolitan centers (not including the retarded NYC and LA type areas) is usually a minimum 1hr from closest centers but in most states they're like 3 hrs apart.
Time it takes to go up or down the east coast is 12 to 17 hrs for most that's not the time to get from northern most tip of main to southern most tip of Florida cuz who the fuck actually does that.
Traveling an hour to do something special is common but traveling an hr for something common or necessity is designated for the extreme mountain ranges like Adirondack, Appalachian, Rocky? (Idk never been just assuming) type of areas.
Anything taking longer than an hr is getting into road trip status and anything over 3 hr is find somewhere to stay and come home tomorrow status. There are exceptions bit depending on how long event is you are adding 6hr round trip time to it.
Caveats:
Rush hour is dependent on area. For example in Buffalo a 45 min trip no traffic is taking you around 50min-1hr in rush hour. Whereas in Frederick, MD (D.C. suburb) a 15 min drive no traffic was taking at leasy 1hr in rush hour. All the same it's every single weekday from 6am to 9am and 3pm to 6pm in every Metropolitan area.
State to neighboring state trips are usually 3 to 6 hr. Usual work commute for everyone not commuting to a city (do honestly most of the US) 5 to 30 mins.
As you might note, the busier and more dense a city is, the closer things can be yet the longer it takes to get somewhere per unit of distance. Unless you walk. Sometimes you're out in the burbs and something's 10 miles away but it'll take you less than 10 mins to get there.
I live on the edge of a small town. Google numbers:
I live in a semi rural area. My closest grocery store is 10km, but it's down the interstate, meaning even if I wanted to walk it, I couldn't. Without using the interstate it's about 15km.
My closest convenience store is only 7km, but the road i live on is not safe for walking (lots of blind curves, no sidewalks)
My nearest bus stop is 60 kilometers away, in my nearest city.
Nearest library is about 4 km past the convenience store, so 11ish klicks
Nearest train station is give or take 300 kilometers. We don't really have any train service here.
Straight line distance from me to big Ben, give or take 6,500 kilometers
I live in a major city
Same figures for me:
For me things were not in meters or feet but hours driven. From my home town the nearest stoplight was 1.5 hours away by car. This is also the closest chain restaurant (like McDonald's or simular). We had a school bus, but other than that no public transit. The next town over (15 minutes) has a supermarket.
Rural American here. We drive 30 mins to the nearest bigish city to do all of our grocery shopping every weekend.
One of my high school girlfriends had to drive 45 minutes each way to school, and home. About 36 miles. She lived in the middle of nowhere near a state park.
I used Google maps to get these values. I'm using Google's estimated walking distance and will also include Google's estimated walking time.
I'm in Utah somewhere south of Salt Lake City (the state capitol). The numbers aren't great, but they're far better than some places I've lived here. As a kid, I remember biking for 20+ minutes to make it to a small supermarket.
EDIT: as others have said, my paths can be quite bendy at times, but it's different than many suburbs in the US. Salt Lake City (and, by extension, most of the valley that it's in) is built on a fairly rigorous grid system. We have lots of straight roads with large blocks (in some cases, it can be 1-2 km between lights and crosswalks). We don't have too many ratfucked suburban mazes, so the walkability problem here is primarily due to sprawl and a dearth of crosswalks.
Here are my walking distances:
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: 5890km
America is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to America.
2.2 Km to nearest chemist / convenience store.
Found Douglas' Lemmy account. Hi, Douglas.
I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s
Actually, the chemist's for me is only about 350m away, next to the chain supermarket
I live in a small shithole town in Pennsylvania about an hour drive outside a major city and 15 minutes outside of a smaller city.
The liquor store a dollar store and a few tiny shops are within ~4k Big Macs(top to bottom length) away, but everywhere else needs a car. There is nothing in town other than a few small shops, everything else was closed long before my time.
It's about a 15 minute drive to get to the next town over since all the stores are there. There is no other non car transportation infrastructure near by other than county buses that you shouldn't use unarmed.
The nearest landmark of any cultural significance (outside of going into the city) is the empty field in Somerset county a few hours away.
Basically if I want something other than whiskey or bread, it's a 15 minute drive. Still better than when I was still living with my parents because they were even further out from civilization.
Getting to the next closest state is about a 3 hours trip and I'm close to the border.
I live in a newly developed area. The nearest convenience store to me is a ~10 minute drive. Also, since people only started living here a few years ago, the city has only just started paying attention to quality of life things like shade trees, so you'd be walking a good 45 minutes there and back in direct sunlight.
I fucking hate this country 🙃
Here in London, using a car is pain and suffering with single-digit average speeds due to intense traffic jams
Wow. I thought I lived in a pretty walkable part of Atlanta. I really only use my car for the grocery or a 'big' shopping trip.
And I don't even live anywhere the centre: I live in one of the only London boroughs without an Underground station, that borders ~~no man's land~~ the outside of London
I live in a suburban area of Columbus, Ohio.
You also mention you can get somewhere within 10 minutes of walking. A lot of Americans will refuse to walk that far. For many people in the country and the suburbs, the bulk of the outdoor walking they do is to/from their cars and to get the mail.
It's hard for Europeans to understand, but nearly all American cities are built around the concept that everyone has their own car and drives everywhere to get around. Even things that are 5 minute walks, Americans will get in the car and drive to. Mass transit (again in most cities) is coded as "for poor people who can't afford a car", so it's always difficult to use and is much slower than having your own car.
