I’ve heard the legends of having to drive to literally everywhere (e.g. drive thru banks), but I have no clue how far apart things are.
I live in suburban London where you can get to a big supermarket in 10 minutes of walking, a train station in 20 minutes and convenience stores are everywhere. You can get anywhere with bus and train in a few hours.
Can someone help a clueless British lemmyposter know how far things are in the US?
EDIT
Here are my walking distances:
- To the nearest convenience store: 250m
- To the nearest chain supermarket: 350m
- To the bus stop: 310m
- To the nearest park: 400m
- To the nearest big supermarket: 1.3km
- To the nearest library: 1.2km
- To the nearest train station: 1km
Straight-line distance to Big Ben: 16km
I live pretty close to work, it’s about 15 miles (24 km). Grocery store is about 6 miles (9.6 km) from me. I consider anything within 2 miles (3.2 km) to be “right next door.” It’s not uncommon for me to travel over 100 miles (161 km) in a day. I consider When I want to visit my Sister it’s a 1120 mile (1802 km) journey. That happens a couple times a year. The crazy thing is that that’s less than halfway across the continental US. I have to travel from the Atlantic ocean all the way across the international date line in the Pacific to get across the US, and that doesn’t include our territories, just our states.
What I have found is a better comparison is the US and Europe. Think of the european country’s as us states and you start to get an idea of the scale. 44 countries vs 50 states, $24.22 trillion vs $28.65 trillion GDP, 10.2 million sq km vs 9.8 million sq km. They are very similar.