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> One grocery store every 5 miles costs far less to maintain than 100 corner stores distributed evenly throughout the city. I'm not at all convinced that this
by aqme28 5y ago
> One grocery store every 5 miles costs far less to maintain than 100 corner stores distributed evenly throughout the city.
I'm not at all convinced that this is true. It would make sense in a vacuum, but there are a lot of negatives from the road infrastructure necessary for large driving-only grocery stores.
Dense cities have lots of smaller grocery stores rather than a few large ones. I'm sure there's a reason for that.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Dense cities have lots of smaller grocery stores rather than a few large ones. Hm? In my experience, dense cities have lots of smaller grocery stores, and they also have lots of gargantuan grocery stores.
- throwaway81523 5y agoIn San Francisco, as far as I can tell, there are lots of small grocery stores, a fair number of medium sized ones (Trader Joe etc), one big one (Costco), and no really gargantuan ones. Maybe I'm not shopping in the right places though.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoSan Francisco is not what I would describe as a "dense city". It does appear to be true that grocery store availability in San Francisco is just a straight downgrade from what you can find in e.g. much of the rest of the Bay Area. But that's a choice by San Francisco, not some truth about cities.
- TillE 5y agoI can't think of a single big grocery store in Manhattan, the densest city in America. In Berlin there are probably only a handful, and they're not in the city center.
- wpm 5y agoAnd it’s a great mix. I can do 99% of my shopping for food and liquor at the corner store. When I need to buy for a huge dinner party, or find some rare ingredient/bottle, I can ride a few miles on my bike to the larger store.
- Ajedi32 5y agoOkay, maybe dense cities were a bad example. Obviously density makes a larger number of stores per square mile more viable than it would be in a less dense area, even if you have a highly effective transportation system. My point though is that, all factors considered, our current city layout actually is close to optimal under the assumption that road construction is free. The problem of course being that road construction is _not_ free; we've just created an incentive structure that causes the market to behave as it it were.
- aqme28 5y agoBased on what I've read, it's not that road construction is expensive, it's that ongoing maintenance of roads and connected utilities is quite expensive.