WE ONCE HAD STREETCARS LOOK WHAT THEY TOOK FROM US
These “take a train” crowd think that everyone in every city and every town has a subway system or even a functional bus system. It’s like the bicycle people who insist that I don’t need a car, I can just strap my kids to my back in winter and drop them off at school before cycling to work and stopping for errands and groceries on the way home! So easy! /s
If I didn’t NEED a car I wouldn’t drive one, and that applies to most people. But for some reason everyone on here is a 20something city kid with easy access to public transit
“These ‘take a train’ crowd” tend to be also the ones saying “build more trains, light rail, and tram lines, also bike lanes” but who are prevented from making progress at every turn by oil and motor lobbyists. They are very aware of the limitations but generally encourage it because it’s a good thing to do.
This is the most offensive and derogatory form of ableism. I'm reporting this and I'm tagging you as "Person who hates the disabled" and I am not going to spend even a moment thinking about how mass transit or pedestrian pathways might benefit an individual with mobility issues.
See your comment brings up the big issue I have with the bicycle crowd. I literally cannot ride a bike due to disability , so ride transit right? If my city had a good and reliable transit system i fucking would! But it doesn’t, and it never fucking will. So yes I will give up the car and take transit every day, when pigs fly and my city has a good transit system.
Your way of thinking relies on the belief that transit is adequate in most places, and it sure as hell is not
Please, add /s. I almost believed you.
Lemme strap my wife and kids to my back while I cycle them all to their destinations then head off to work 50km away in the dead of winter!
Bicycle people have no brain, they think everyone lives in California or some shit
I do this with light rail. Takes 6 minutes with slow walking included. It's pleasant.
Especially in the winter. I live in Norway, so if I use a car I wait for the engine to warm up before driving. (It's better for the engine.) This and removal of ice and snow easily takes more than 6 minutes. I'm really glad I don't have a car.
Most of the world is not like Norway and having a car is a necessity not a desire
The fact people want to get in a car in order to get groceries is beyond me. I'm in Australia, where car brain is also very prevalent, but with many urban places good for walking and PT.
I live close to the shops, and go there multiple times a week because it's literally right there. Driving and parking? Nah, I'm good.
Friends I have talk about ordering groceries so casually. I go onto these apps and see a 20% markup with delivery fees and I'm like what the fuck.
I live in Houston. We have a grocery store in town that has a big apartment block over the top of it. A friend lives there and he jokes that he's taking the elevator to the grocery store any time I complain about traffic or parking.
Unfortunately, living in a posh apartment that's conveniently placed over a nice grocery store means the price of rent is astronomical. So he needs to work as a highly paid attorney in the oil industry to afford to live in a place where he doesn't need to use a car to get groceries.
American problems
Ideally we could just fucking walk to a small grocery store instead of having to drive to one. Also would increase jobs with more foot traffic.
Most Americans lost one or both of their feet to the diabeetus
Don't forget polio, due to anti-vaxxers, it's making a comeback!
If you are not disabled in anyway and still need to take a transport bigger than a bicycle to buy basic groceries, the design of the city you live in is fundamentally broken.
As a disabled person, thanks for remembering us. I'll see these "just hop on your bike and pedal over!" comments and it's kinda saddening.
Taking a train to the grocery store only seems absurd to people who have never experienced a really efficient rail system.
You get what you pay for.
as a Dutchy, this confuses me greatly
Trains solve traffic issues
Elon brings shame to autists everywhere by not knowing about trains
Gregory does not have enough trains in his neighbourhood
Elon brings shame to autists everywhere by not knowing about trains
Elon's not actually autistic. He's just terminally online and regularly high off his gord. Once he sobers up, he does a masterful job of rooking WASPs out of their retirement accounts and state treasuries out of their tax monies by doing his best Music Man impression.
yeah, the Netherlands is so nice with that, you bike to a station for 10 minutes and then its a 2 hour train ride to go anywhere in the country
why would I take a train when the store is 3 minutes walking diatance
That's literally communism and also the cause of everything wrong with the economy, that's why!
My township is going through this
Vandalism, threats, people screaming in public, and so on; all afraid that the new area being built having stores within walking distance is a government conspiracy to restrict people’s ability to leave
…all the existing parts of town have grocers and shops within walking distance
Driving is for free people, walking is for slaves! /s
Light rail. All the time. Train isn't only Amtrak.
Introducing:the tramway!
Wait until they hear about the Bus. But probably is for the best they don't, their head would explode at the thought
Bro, I can walk 1 mile to the grocery store and 1 mile back. That's roughly an hour including shopping. I have a disability on my right foot so I'm slow moving.
I can walk 1/2 a mile to the bus stop and spend another 20-30 min to the store, so around 2 or more hours.
I can drive there in 5 minutes.
Cars are not the solution and are terrible for the environment but many people don't have other options
This dude jokes but when I lived in Harlem I’d take the subway to Columbus circle Whole Foods as it was significantly easier than commuting to the east side on 125 to pathmark.
It's actually called zoning reform. Bring back neighborhood grocery stores you can walk to. Before I experienced it, I never thought about how convenient it is to walk less than 5 minutes to a grocery store almost every day and do little grocery trips instead of bit multi-bag struggles.
Bring back neighborhood grocery stores you can walk to.
This is actually probably more a federal antitrust/competition law thing than a local zoning thing. Otherwise it wouldn't have happened nationwide. I found this article to be pretty persuasive:
Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.
. . .
Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them. It does, however, allow businesses to pass along legitimate savings. If it truly costs less to sell a product by the truckload rather than by the case, for example, then suppliers can adjust their prices accordingly—just so long as every retailer who buys by the truckload gets the same discount.
. . .
During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway.
With discriminatory pricing outlawed, competition shifted onto other, healthier fronts. National chains scrambled to keep up with independents’ innovations, which included the first modern self-service supermarkets, and later, automatic doors, shopping carts, and loyalty programs. Meanwhile, independents worked to match the chains’ efficiency by forming wholesale cooperatives, which allowed them to buy goods in bulk and operate distribution systems on par with those of Kroger and A&P. A 1965 federal study that tracked grocery prices across multiple cities for a year found that large independent grocers were less than 1 percent more expensive than the big chains. The Robinson-Patman Act, in short, appears to have worked as intended throughout the mid-20th century.
Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it.
That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. . . . Kroger, Safeway, and other supermarket chains followed suit. . . . Then, in the 1990s, they embarked on a merger spree. In just two years, Safeway acquired Vons and Dominick’s, while Fred Meyer absorbed Ralphs, Smith’s, and Quality Food Centers, before being swallowed by Kroger. The suspension of the Robinson-Patman Act had created an imperative to scale up.
A massive die-off of independent retailers followed. Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers, creating a “waterbed effect” that amplified the disparity. Price discrimination spread beyond groceries, hobbling bookstores, pharmacies, and many other local businesses. From 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers shrank from 53 percent to 22 percent.
The whole thing is worth reading.
Genuinely high quality post.
And yet another Reagan roast.
Wow, one more thing to thank Reagan for that I was unaware of. Thank you for the link.
Thanks for sharing the article! It was very informative. I'm definitely going to remember it as the Robert pattinson law though.
In the US you'd be arrested for unlawful walking in a car only area, or something.
Would probably help with remembering reusable bags too. Instead of driving there and being like 'oh no!' you're walking, and would realize you're not carrying them with you.
I'm fine going to the supermarket for a medium shop every week or two but being able to walk to get milk for my breakfast (especially if I only realised I'd ran out in the morning!) was so nice.
Now I don't live in town any more, it's an 11-mile drive to the nearest shop so it's more like a once a month shopping trip. Fresh fruit and veg? What's that?
Working from home is the only way to really beat traffic.
No congestion at all. Not even an overcrowded train.
Greg is gonna shit on the floor when he'll learn that happens everywhere in Europe.
In socialist Europe, I walk to the groceries, comrade... I take 15min train ride from home to work in the city center... and I wait no longer than 5 minutes on train because that's its frequency.. but I have no car...
Damn it must suck to live in such terrible conditions
Don't a decent amount of European businesses even do delivery in back by train?
Probably, I mean it makes sense. The few times I've been in Europe, in the many cities I've been, the public transit was good.
People really need to commute for groceries? Like, I have the store 1 block away. Americans don't know they can walk?
I live in the U.S. (for less than one more week now!) and currently, the closest place for me to buy groceries is five miles down a four lane highway. No sidewalks, obviously. You would be safe from cars walking on the median, less safe from poison ivy, ticks and lime disease since they don't exactly care about keeping them well-mowed in the summer.
I can already see that things will be different in the place where we will be temporarily living in the UK (Blackburn).
The closest (and not my preferred because it's kind of expensive) grocery store would be a 2 hr round trip walking distance from me
That's just fucked up, I'm so sorry.
Food deserts are a thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
They impact millions of people.
Yeah, it's fucked up.
TIL
Most Americans leave too far away from any supermarket, even if there were roads that could take you there, either by walking or cycling.
I say it's a business opportunity, why don't Americans just open a small general store in their residential areas? Not everything need to come from a supermarket, here we have people that literally sell you vegetables in a rented garage.
Seems like the only acceptable usage of garages for you people are tech startups and maybe teenager bands lol.
I hope the answer is not "due to some obtuse regulation, residential areas can't have business operating in any shape or form, unless is a tech startup or an ice cream truck".
It turns out that, despite allegations to the contrary, the United States is actually small. Like, really, really tiny. We just don't have the room to put supermarkets in places near where people live.
I usually stop at a grocery store on my commute, but if I just need something real quick I just walk to one of the three grocery stores down the street, but loading up the car on the way home is just much easier
The best is when the grocery stores are so close that you don't need a car or a train. Japan does it right. You can always walk to at least one grocery store.
It's not only Japan, I dare to say most countries have grocery stores within walkable distances.
It sure was great. We don't have that at all in the US.
True enough for urban areas.
There's also a lot of more rural areas in Japan where the only thing in walking distance from a house is a bus stop, and it might be a bit of a long walk.
I'm sure there are more remote places, but I haven't been to those places.
I think the important part is that the Japan residents know it is possible once the town or city grows vs here in North America where people cannot fanthom the idea of not having a car (or in the US and Canada 1 car per person on the home).
I am privileged since I have been able to work from home recently, but it is so clear that you don’t need a car if non-work things were closer (better zoning and design roads for people instead of cars). Once you put 1k miles per year on your car instead of 10-20k and your quality of life is much higher due to no stress from having to commute it starts to radicalize you against into the dumb shit we do in the name of growth and profit (not violently but still makes you feel cheated out of a better life).
"boss battle"
So fucking cringe.
Many cities at one time had trolley service which did local point to point connection. Then they were forced out because there was more profit in growing car dependency.
There were forced out because they had to pay for the road surface but vehicles could use it for free and cause damage. They also would block the trolley because people have always been assholes.
More importantly they had contracts with the cities with set fares and the cities wouldn't let them increase the fares so they went bankrupt. source
Capitalist government when public transport (a public service) is not making profits
Seems more like politicians were
bribedlobbied to cut funding by car makers than they were counting coins and said we'd get more (as a government) if everyone just drove from home.
Fun fact: this is the premise of Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Woke agenda:
Legs, Gondolas, Buses, Trams
Yeah right, let me just walk to the supermarket XD
is back in 25 minutes with bag of grocceries
:o
"I don't want to carry bags all that way!"
Here. Take a backpack.
no im obese and entirely brainwashed that walking is detriemntal to my health or smth idfk
societal constraints hold back the minds of those who are lazy to change
:D
Yeah there's this thing called LIGHT RAIL, but even heavy rail, the NYC subway and BART are actually both heavy rail transit systems that one could absolutely casually take to the grocery store.
Their real issue is they think they have to travel 20+KM to the closest Walmart every time they want to buy something.
If you have to take a train to the grocery, that's a failure in local planning and a business opportunity. That said, not every store has everything and I, too, have taken a train to the grocery store for fancier/rarer things.
In some parts of rural Japan, we also have a grocery truck carrying staples and things you requested the last time they came from the actual store. This is a huge lifeline to some rural elderly people, but I don't see why it couldn't be more broadly applied in other areas.
Holy based. Very cool
I had two grocery stores in 5 minute walking distance. I had one store with more stuff, think also basic electronics, kitchenware, home appliances etc, in one station with the inner city train that was a 5 minute walk from my flat.
For years i did my groceries taking the train and i fail to see the problem. Just having to walk to the parking lot, get my car, drive to the store i can reach by train, then park there would have taken me twice as long even without traffic.
In inner cities cars are a liability for everyone including their driver.
We just have food delivery. You order and it arrives the next day, no delivery fee. Of course the sales usually aren't as good as in typical stores but the general prices are almost identical. They deliver in cute little electric vehicles.
That's cool. Though less bog in terms of infrastructure.
If the frequency is good enough, this isn't a problem.
The best case scenario is as you mentionned : a grocery that you can walk easily, that has everything you need.
But having a light rail with high frequency makes it so that you can reach more area easily. And it also means that less dense part of the city still be serviced decently.
Yes, it's called a tram. It's how I get to the shops, city centre, etc.
I get her point but trams!!!
I think she should see a city with trams and see how useful it is when implemented properly :)))
trams are the train's cute younger sibling :)
Trains also work to get other traffic off the road too. It solves congestion for everybody, not just you. That way when you do have to drive a car, there are fewer of them on the road.
What if trains weren't slow? 🤔
Wdym? In what clown world are trains slow?
THE LAAAAAAAND OF THE FREEEEEEE! 🇺🇸🦅🛻🔫
They are slower than driving except in peak traffic. Caltrain san Francisco to san Jose is about 2x driving time, and on neither end does the train get you into real downtown. San Jose is close but still a 15 minute walk before you get to anything interesting. Francisco is in a relatively shady area near a stadium, also 15 mins from market.
If you don't have to park, getting to the airport by transit involves switching from Caltrain to BART at a random suburb so as an example San Jose to SFO is 30 mins by car, 1:30 by train. Note the tracks for the Caltrain and Bart are parallel here.
Amtrak has entered the chat
What if they didn't have to run on tracks either? And then there could be smaller personal sized versions that families could own too!
why the fuck would any family want to own their own trolleybus
This hillbilly has never been to NYC
You could take a train to the shop, though. If the infrastructure is built right.
Only if you live in a city
My parents, who live in a town, can just walk to buy their groceries instead.
Good for them, but I know a dozen towns that are big enough you can't, or the only store wouldn't be in realistic walking distance for at least half the residents.
And even those that can, you have to either be in good health. So it isn't like your parents (or anyone's) will always be able to walk to the grocery.
Instant Teleportation when?
If we ever figure out teleportation, it will be expensive. Of course, there's a free tier where you get teleported into a void where you will have to watch ads for 20 minutes before you get sent to your destination. Complete with regular reminders that you can simply upgrade your plan to get out of teleportation purgatory immediately.
walking is an option
When the train tracks are south of the major highway, and the grocery store is north of the major highway, that doesn't seem very safe in my area. What do?
That's just idiotic traffic design. I would tell you a solution but I don't have one. You either make something happen politically or move. Shitty infrastructure is the worst.
The tracks were originally designed for industrial use only, major industries south of the tracks. Now they're planning to upgrade them to passenger tracks for Amtrak...
That doesn't sound like a good or safe idea to me. Most anywhere any everyday passenger would want to visit, save for the beaches, is north of the tracks.
Many options, in no particular order of feasibility:
-
Dedicated bus lane across the highway, plus half hourly or better regular bus service.
-
A separated bicycle lane in that area to safely get you between the two.
-
A light rail line (preferably in a dedicated lane) or subway crossing highway.
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Get a grocer opened closer to you.
-
Move north of the highway or somewhere else entirely.
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Build a rail spur going north over the highway and add a train service.
-
something a lot of people miss is, that some people have to shop for more than 3 or 4 people, when I grew up we were 5 plus a somewhat big dog, you can't really do weekly shopping without some kind of help under these circumstances
I use public transport to get everywhere I can, which is pretty easy where I live, but having 4 full shopping bags on a tram sounds like a horrible experience
People in countries and cities with good public transport don’t really do “weekly”. They stop in to the local market on the way home daily or every other day. There’s literally an express type grocery store every block or three, and a full serve store probably 10-15 minutes walk.
I spend a lot of time overseas for work, and getting groceries is without a car is zero trouble.
It tends to be much easier in walkable/well designed areas because you have a much higher density of grocery stores.
I have about 8 within a 2-10 minute walk. So I don't really do a big weekly shop, but rather a couple small ones throughout the week.
So yeah, depends hugely on how human-friendly the area is
Just shop daily instead of weekly. A grocery store just opened three blocks from me so I just walk down with a single canvas bag and grab what I need for the next day or two. For the dog, we walk down to the pet store together to grab his food and a treat or toy for him.
Obviously not possible in many suburbs, but when you live in a walkable area it works great.
Sure. But one car ride a week to fulfill the daily needs of six living beeings doesn't cause congestion. What has this to do with anything?
If you live in more urban areas, you even don't need your own car for that.
