I'm in an American suburb. Transport options available to me:

- Lightrail

- Train (Amtrack station downtown, accessible from lightrail)

- Bus (w/bike rack, bus stop 100ft from my front door)

- Electric bicycle hire

- Electric scooter hire

- Foot (nearest grocery is 1.2mi, nearest restaurants are 0.8mi)

- Taxi

- Own bicycle (bike trail from neighborhood to the office park where I work)

- Aeroplane (lightrail goes to one of the largest international airports)

- Own Car (large driveway, two car garage w/ electric vehicle charging)

- Own bicycle

- Own Motorcycle

That sounds great, why aren't there more places like that in the US or why don't I hear about them? Do you find you have to use your car often?

(Although living 2km away from a supermarket is an alien concept to me. I have three within a hundred metres.)

You might not hear about it as much because sadly the mass transit is underutilized by a lot of my neighbors. Also, people usually really prefer the freedom of having private transportation. Like, just riding a bicycle so max of ~5mi or so, I have maybe an option of three different supermarkets (six if you include pharmacies, which usually do stock some groceries). If you add a simple bus route, that adds maybe another two. If you choose to take a car, its literally more than dozen different super markets within a 10 minute drive which would have been an unrealistic bike ride or a complex bus path, which is not something you want to do with a week's worth of a family's amount of food you're carrying.

Its then the same thing when it comes to going to restaurants. I can easily walk to three or four restaurants. Bike, add another handful. Bus, add another dozen. A 10min drive? Literally a dozen options of practically any kind of food you could possibly imagine.

So you get less choices for more time if you ride a bike or take the bus. This is the math that most Americans do. Since its somewhat cheap to own a car for most of the US, they don't even stop to think of the cost of driving versus the cost of riding a bike or walking or taking the bus.

As to having a supermarket close by, the supermarkets near me as absolutely massive. The Kroger near me has at least 30 aisles, a full deli, full bakery, full butcher stand, full florist, fresh sushi station, massive produce section, and a hot and ready to go meal area. And its only about average sized for the area. If you've never seen them, modern American supermarkets are incredibly massive, larger than what I've seen of most European groceries. There's usually a bit of distance between them because they're such massive places. Its often not just a small hole in the wall grocer with a dozen or so aisles and a produce section.

Thanks for replying, it's really fascinating.

I think part of the difference is density - my city is only about 3km x 3km. If I cycled 5 miles I'd end up in the next town along. I just looked on TripAdvisor to see how many restaurants were within that range but it maxxed out at 1,000+.

We do have big supermarkets too, at the edge of the city - about 75,000 sqft eyeballing it on Google Earth, apparently only a bit smaller than the average Walmart. I've never really seen why I would go there, except perhaps for ease of parking if I was going to buy a huge amount of food with a car. And this is France so even the tiny supermarkets make room for a bakery : )

So the maths here is mostly that cars are just negative. I'm very optimistic that electric bikes will begin to dominate transport in European cities - we just need to build the infrastructure to make sure that they're safe to ride.

> about 75,000 sqft eyeballing it on Google Earth, apparently only a bit smaller than the average Walmart

The average Walmart is twice that size at ~180,000sqft.

The number I saw was 100,000 sqft - it seems like it depends on whether you exclude the smallest Walmarts : )

They have over 3,400 stores at ~180,000sqft. There are three within a short drive from my home. They have ~190 around 40,000sqft. The ~800 mid-sized "discount" stores are mostly closing and don't have groceries, they're ~100,000sqft.

Big American stores are absolutely massive, and they're all over the place.

https://247wallst.com/retail/2014/03/22/walmart-now-has-six-...

You mentioned you had like one of these massive stores at the edge of your town, and it was still only half as big. I've got several of these monsters within 8mi of my home.

I'll update the size of American supermarkets in my mind by 100% : )

There are broadly 5 big shops within comfortable distance of me - one of them is between 150-200,000 sqft [1], so I guess a mid-sized American store. But I've only been to one of them, when I needed some electronics, because I don't see the point otherwise. Presumably other people do or the shops wouldn't exist...

Unrelated - does "town" mean something different in American English? To me it means a place bigger than a village but smaller than a city. The city I'm in has 300k - 1m people in it, depending on how you draw the boundaries.

[1]: its car park extends onto its roof which I guess might be amusing to an American. Land is expensive here.

I said "town" due to the geographic size of ~3km^2. My "town", really a small city, is ~70km^2 and a population of ~100k. It is surrounded by other towns/cities forming the Dallas/Ft Worth Metroplex, which metro area is 24,000km^2 with ~6 million people in that space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas%E2%80%93Fort_Worth_metr...

I just checked Google Maps, there are almost a dozen of these 180,000sqft Walmarts within a 10min drive (a "comfortable distance" here) from my home. And that's just Walmart, there's also probably another six or so Target locations of similar size. I do agree this is absolutely excessive and insane though, there's such a massive amount of real estate of just big box retail.

The reason why these stores are seemingly dominating local retail is the same reason why cars are dominating travel in the US or why Amazon seems to be dominating internet retail. Apparent convenience. Why bother going to a clothier, then go to a cobbler, then go to the electronics store, then go to a video store, then go to the furniture store, then go to the auto parts store, then go to the butcher, then go to the baker, then go to the grocer. Instead, you can do practically every bit of your shopping in a single store, all at once. Find some new linens for your bed, then go grab a new pair of shoes, better stock up on some fresh underwear, maybe that 40" TV we got a few years ago isn't cutting it get a bigger one, then grab some milk and eggs and we'll check out in the Auto department to pick up the car after the oil change.

Hah, I've actually looked at Dallas-Fort Worth before and been horrified at how so much of its residential green space is golf courses. Is most of the conurbation as well served by non-car transport or is your area a special case? It looks so low density that it's hard to imagine anything being economically viable. Then again, bike lanes and bike racks are so cheap that they're pretty much free.

I do understand consolidating regular purchases into one trip - I just go to the supermarket for food (and occasionally Asian supermarkets for non-perishables that French supermarkets don't sell). I don't see the added convenience in doing the same with once-in-5-year purchases. If anything I'd probably get fed up with walking past loads of things I wasn't remotely interested in buying. Maybe there's some spontaneity to buying stuff that I just don't have.

> Is most of the conurbation as well served by non-car transport or is your area a special case?

I'm definitely in the more special case kind of area, by choice. There were many reasons why I picked the place where I live, and transit options were one of the key ones.

> Maybe there's some spontaneity to buying stuff that I just don't have.

I feel you on this idea. I'm not really a huge fan of these ridiculously giant stores with absolutely massive parking lots, I'd like for smaller grocers to be more popular. In the US at least, smaller grocers are dying, and grocers surviving are building bigger stores to try and compete more on the level of those 180,000sqft behemoths. The death of the smaller grocers leave behind 15-20,0000sqft largely empty retail storefronts around, at least in the big cities.

> horrified at how so much of its residential green space is golf courses.

There's a municipal golf course real close to my house, at the edge of my neighborhood. What is so horrifying about it? This land was prairie land, so its not like we're greenifying the desert or something like that. It would have been a bunch of small rolling hills, creeks, small ponds, and grasses before it was a golf course. The people in the area like to golf, why is it any worse than it just being a more generic park? Would you have also expressed such horror if it was filled with frisbee golf courses, or soccer fields?

That said, within my neighborhood there's a several acre park that is a bit more of generic greenspace. It has playgrounds for kids, a fishing pond, a soccer field, a baseball field, a softball field, etc. It also has a bunch of picnic tables and grills scattered at the tree lines. These kinds of parks are pretty common around where I live as well. It is not like all parks are golf courses. Certainly more than what you'd see in France, but golf is also significantly more popular here than in urban areas of France I'd imagine. If nobody was using them I'd get the point of them being horrified at the waste, but for many of the golf courses you need to book your tee time days in advance.

I don't have anything against golf as such, it's more that from a distance they looked like really nice little parks that people could use to walk between neighbourhoods, socialise, walk dogs, picnic in etc. Then I zoomed in and realised it was probably only for people playing golf. Football pitches are less well camouflaged from satellite pictures, so they wouldn't be as disappointing. Golf courses are kind of inherently low density too - you can't really cram many more than five people onto each hole at once.

FWIW we do have golf clubs here - Cannes / Antibes in particular has loads - but that's unrepresentative of France as a whole.

Your park does sound nice. I'd heard stories of Americans in suburbs having to drive their dogs to places where they could be walked - maybe it was an exaggeration.

This would be very strange, maybe they meant take outside off a leash? I can take my dog to the park in my neighborhood but there are leash laws requiring him to be on-leash unless at a specified "dog park" fenced in space. There are a few dog parks that would be more in the driving kind of distance* which have separate fenced in areas depending on size. I mostly just take my dog around the park on his leash, or walk around the neighborhood, or just take advantage of the couple thousand square feet of yard I have in my backyard. After all, that's one of the many reasons why I have a yard, a nice safe place for my child and dog to play around in, a private place I can set up amateur radio antennas somewhat permanently, a private place I can grill and entertain at the private pool, etc. My dog can feel free to just leave to the backyard through a doggie door any time he wants and chase off the neighborhood cats, squirrels, rodents, etc.

At least when it comes to the municipal golf courses, those are usually open to the public during the day to walk all the trails around the courses. They're often also connected to the bike trails in the municipal area which are then usually connected to a lot of the other parks and nature preserves. There are over 80 miles of bike and walking trails in my small city that connect most of the parks and greenspaces. They are not bike lanes on a busy street; these are separate paths that cut through behind neighborhoods, down utility corridors, go under busy bridges, etc.

And I do acknowledge many French people love golf and there are golf courses around, but especially compared to DFW I can't imagine on average its as popular. I'd wager at least 20% of families have at least one full set of golf clubs, and a large percentage of them do some kind of golf event a few times a year. Dallas is the home of places like Top Golf, which is a massively popular evening outing. You wouldn't be able to even think about building something like this inside most urban areas of France, but DFW has four and they're always like a 30-40min wait.

https://topgolf.com/us/

* Its only a few miles on walking trails, but my dog would probably be halfway worn out just getting to the park and would be completely exhausted starting out the trip home.