And even when the supermarket/mall is close by in the US, you still can't necessarily walk/bike there. I was visiting a friend who lived in the Midwest and his house was less than a mile from the mall. I asked him how to walk over there, and he admitted he'd never tried. So I set out to try, and the only way I found was by running across a busy 4 lane street without any crossings.
California, in particular, has a population density of about 100 people per square kilometer which is about the same as France. Most of California is either uninhabitable, factory farms, or military reservations. The population is highly concentrated near the coast.
People who haven't been there imagine that Los Angeles is "sprawl" but the truth it is very high density that is "sprawling" over a large plain that is boxed in by mountains. Millions of people have a line of sight to the Hollywood sign.
(I grew up in Southern New Hampshire which is based on Buckminister Fuller's diabolical geometry of airports and subdvisions -- where getting from one subdivision to the next is like going from the right side of your left lung to the right side of your left lung all the way up to the fork in your trachea. That is a self-inflicted wound that has nothing to do with how dense the population is.)
One approach is scale-dependent (divide the area into a grid of square kilometers, sort by population, pick the square kilometer where the median person lives.) but you would get different answers if you picked different scales.
The median of "How far away is your nearest neighbor?" seems parameter free at first but it is absurd if you live in an apartment. (e.g. ignores all the space around your apartment.) I guess you could look for the median (or other decile) of "What is radius in which N people live?" where N might be 100-10,000 but then you're back to having a spectrum instead of a single number again.
Maybe you can't avoid that.
And before anyone says I should just live in places that are like that, It's not so easy to just pick up my life and move somewhere else.
Does anyone have more details on this in written form? It's annoyingly difficult to google for because it's the other London.
Various British cities have been guilty of this; Bradford had a "hole" for about a decade due to an unbuilt shopping centre. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2009/08/27/b...
That said, I drive this mess everyday and my 25 min cross town commute makes Torontonians cry. I don’t bike or bus though, so I do ultimately agree with him.
Regarding downtown. You won’t find more information on that shack thing because it’s not real. Besides a couple historic floods and fires I can’t think of what he means.
It's not just bike and transit unfriendly, it's bad for cars too. There's no easy way to get from one side to the other in less than an hour during the day, short of taking a helicopter.
Compare London to nearby Kitchener/Waterloo. They essentially have a ring road (hwy 85), PLUS a light rail + bus rapid transit system. It's still absolutely full of stroads, but at least it's more accessible and things actually move around.
In London, Oxford is essentially a 10 KM long parking lot every day at 9 AM, and Adelaide spends about two hours a day blocked by freight trains. Every attempt to fix the city frankly makes it worse. I don't know if it's because of poor planning, inept council, the lack of geographical constraints, or some other factor, but this city is the absolute show piece for failed urban design.
So yeah, I think it's completely reasonable to lean into London ON, it's the perfect case study in bad north american cities.
If you live in a large US city, this can still be very manageable. There are two large grocery stores and a small one as well as a Target and a metro line within a 5 minute walk of my house. Apart from the metro line, we didn't really prioritize the grocery stores, etc when looking for a house. That said, there are many downsides to living in big US cities as well.
* 1x big REWE, 3x small REWE, 1x Real, 1x Netto, 2x ALDI, 3x LIDL, 1x Turkish grocery store, 1x Asian grocery store
* Too many kiosks too count (tobacco, drinks, snacks, maybe like a convinience store)
* Too many bakeries to count
* 2 tram/metro stations, soon to be 3
* 5 bus stations (not counting the weird ones)
What they probably meant was they can hop on a bike and be in /any/ supermarket they fancy in this time.
Your city seems pretty good compared to what we're usually seeing from city planning in the US though.
That district has been mostly livable without a car for the past couple years after a grocery store was built there. I say “mostly” because as soon as you want to do anything outside of The dozen or so blocks of the Haymarket a car quickly becomes required again.
This is a common theme of walkable areas in the US and Canada. They do still exist but because of the development patterns of the past 30+ years they are small islands in an ocean of cars. Their scarcity also drives up prices and makes them less affordable than surrounding areas.
Also Carmel, IN for some reason.
- It's the cars that make the cities undesirable
- I was shocked how the historical center of London, ON was demolished to the ground and replaced with shacks
- Kids should be able to walk to school alone in safety
- I live in Europe and I was baffled to learn that multi-purpose developments are disallowed in most of North America. This alone makes me reconsider my plans to move to the States. I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes