8 ms·

I never understood that about America. I've been lost in the suburbs in Michigan once, driving along for ages with just house after house after house, and think

I never understood that about America. I've been lost in the suburbs in Michigan once, driving along for ages with just house after house after house, and thinking, "where's the local shop?" Surely it's got to be worth someone setting up a local shop every couple of miles?

hydrogen18 11y ago
I don't know much about Michigan, but it could be due to zoning that you don't see any shops.
Ygg2 11y ago
Not really. The longer the distance traveled the more you buy per trip. It's universal foraging behavior.
- shasta 11y ago
  That explains why the mega store doesn't want a local shop but not why there is no local shop.
  - steego 11y ago
    Many Americans don't see the value in a local shop because local shops tend to be more expensive and offer fewer choices. It's easier to consolidate your errands and hit a big grocery store and a big box store.
    - EliRivers 11y ago
      That conflicts with a different cultural "fact" I have about US citizens. They love convenience (for example, "convenience stores") and willingly pay extra for it.
      - VLM 11y ago
        Its a class thing. Middle levels have the money to burn and often prioritize time over money. Plus complaining about paying $3 for an apple at the gas station quickie mart is a rare and cheap conspicuous consumption opportunity for them. I only have about 2 hours "off" unallocated tonight and I'm not going to spend 1/4 of my time off today saving $2 on the cost of an apple by going out of my way to shop at the food store. For poor people its a poor people budgeting thing. As per the previous recent discussions on HN, poor guy has $3 in pocket, gas station has $3 apple on shelf, he buys it because 1) he doesn't have $5 to buy a 5 pound bag from the supermarket 2) no idea when/if he'll ever have an extra $5 again to spend on an extra luxury like an apple 3) travel isn't free when you're poor so bus fare and hours spent taking public transit to the store and time spent not working means that $5 bag is more like $15 total systemic cost and thats a bit steep for a poor guy who just has a taste for an apple today? Upper levels have their personal assistant / admin assistant buy the apple for them. Its all going to be expense-d and its a rounding error anyway and the admin assistant is in a hurry so fine here take this $3 convenience store apple and I need a receipt for that thanks. And thats how we love our $3 convenience store apples. Despite most apple sales being in 5 pound bags at the supermarket of course.
        steego 11y ago
        > For poor people its a poor people budgeting thing. ... I couldn't help but read the rest of this paragraph in Cartman's voice.
      - steego 11y ago
        In the suburbs convenience matters with things people buy regularly. You see this manifested as large convenience stores with gas bars and large drug stores that also sell sandwiches and ice cream. Small independent convenience stores tend to lose out to larger ones that have larger gas bars, cheaper gas and more options inside. What's interesting is this trend seems to be reversing a little bit in clusters. Younger people are migrating back to the cities, and more developers in the suburbs are building apartment complexes with shops and restaurants mixed together, giving it the feel of living above a really nice mini mall. :)
      - HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
        Yes, but... The ultimate convenience store is attached to a gas station and has a drive-up window so you don't need to get out of your car. While the ones with drive through windows are rare, I'd be hard pressed to think of a convenience store within a 30 mile radius that was not also a gas station. As far as I can recall, I only see c-stores that don't sell gas inside cities.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    Combination of zoning ordinances keeping shops away from residential areas and shops not being able to compete on price against the mega stores' huge economies of scale.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I think the assumption, which is so basic that other commenters don't bother to mention it, is that every family has two cars. Suburbs in US are car-oriented to the extreme. Having a car changes shopping habits, because you can bring back much more things with you in a single trip to shop.
mtbcoder 11y ago
In the Midwest, suburbs are designed and developed around the car and the "local shops" are generally located in a series of strip malls off the major roads. On the coasts and in denser populated areas, there seems to be a renewed push for more walk-able areas, public transit and such though.
- narrator 11y ago
  I'll tell you the real, but awful, reason why we have such restrictive zoning in the U.S. The idea behind zoning is to make sure that different classes and races don't have to see each other if they don't want to. Putting commercial retail in a residential area would give outsiders an excuse to be there. The whole "white flight" from the cities has left it's mark on zoning ever since the 1960s. IMHO, this is also the reason for really bad public transit.
  - zrail 11y ago
    > IMHO, this is also the reason for really bad public transit. This is an undisputed fact, as people in those communities will readily protest the "crime train" coming through their neighborhoods.[1][2] [1]: http://lewwaters.com/2012/05/22/light-rail-likely-to-raise-vancouvers-crime-rate-again/ http://lewwaters.com/2012/05/22/light-rail-likely-to-raise-v... [2]: http://larslarson.com/would-you-trust-your-kid-on-the-crime-train/ http://larslarson.com/would-you-trust-your-kid-on-the-crime-...
    - pnathan 11y ago
      That's horrifying. 'specially as I thought Portland area had good transit!
      - zrail 11y ago
        Don't get me wrong, Portland has excellent transit. However, a very large number of people who work in Portland actually live in Vancouver, WA. Those commuters strenuously object to running light rail over any proposed replacement bridges for the more than 100 year old trestles that currently handle all of that traffic. In addition, commuters to the south of the city limits also strenuously object to light rail running into their neighborhoods.
mietek 11y ago
Apparently, it’s not permitted: > In North-American zoning, zones clearly specify which use is allowed on it. In general, zones allow only one or two uses. For example, a residential single-family detached home zone tolerates only single-family detached houses. Don't try to put a convenience store or a school in one, nor a duplex. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/japanese-zoning.ht... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  This is purely a suburban problem and typical of the short sightedness of suburban development, which often corrupts the political process because a mandated retail lot is one less high-profit residential home they can't sell. Here in the city, there are shops everywhere. Mix use residential is fairly common with retail on the ground floor and condos/apartments up top. This has created a glut of storefronts with varying results. Its nice to have all these shops, but the glut of small storefronts means much lowered rents than before so a lot of fly-by-night businesses take over, and in my opinion, hurt the neighborhood like pawn shops, yet another open 4am tattoo shop, yet another shitty independent cricket/boost reseller, yet another liquor convenience store, yet another e-cig store, yet another detailing/hand carwash, yet another gourmet-style restaurant that will fold in 12 months, etc. Desireable shops like Trader Joes or Nordstrom can't open in those tiny and no parking storefronts so its high margin retail junk. This isn't as common anymore -- thank god, but when I was a kid, every other residential block in Chicago had a corner bar. A few nice, but most just depressing places full of serious drunks causing problems all through the night. So yeah, being too liberal with business licenses isn't so great. So this kind of thing cuts both ways, but yes, in the suburbs its especially bad. But at least they have the roads and capacity to handle it and their shopping centers are massive, which is nice as you can park at a giant mall or strip mall and get everything you need done. I can't do that, I have no giant structures like this remotely near me. In the city, we need closer stores because of how bad traffic and parking are. If suburban driving was this bad then they'd have the political impetus to change zoning. tldr; city planning is hard and political.
maxsilver 11y ago
It's usually heavily frowned upon to setup a local shop in Michigan like that, and sometimes illegal. Retail creates undesirable traffic and crime (at least, that's their common assumption). The suburbs fight hard to keep that as far away from residential areas as possible. Sometimes they push this to the logical extreme conclusion -- zoning commercial spaces almost exclusively at the edge of their limits. Here's examples of the actual zoning permitted in Kentwood and Grandville, (suburbs of Grand Rapids, Michigan). http://www.ci.kentwood.mi.us/CityOfKentwood/media/files/original-files/planning/Maps/Zoning-Map-%2824x24-in-color%29-Oct2014.pdf http://www.ci.kentwood.mi.us/CityOfKentwood/media/files/orig... http://www.cityofgrandville.com/images/pdf/Zoning%20Map%20April%202010.pdf http://www.cityofgrandville.com/images/pdf/Zoning%20Map%20Ap... On both maps, you'll see almost all of the red (commercial) areas are near various edge boundaries, and there's little-to-no commercial activity allowed near any central neighborhood(s).
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  It's not for everyone (including me), but there is a certain serenity to a nice suburb with no traffic, small streets, kempt housing, kids wandering around, and faces you recognize. Corporate retail is the antithesis of that vision. A small gas station or tiny corner store is pushing it.
mattste 11y ago
Having grown up in Michigan, I can attest to this. It has made me want to abandon this state so heavily built around the automobile. Even downtown Detroit has wide city streets and few walkable areas. Ann Arbor, on the other hand, is pedestrian friendly, and one can manage without a car.
logfromblammo 11y ago
At a suburban population density of 640/mi^2 (1 acre/person), a circle with 3 mile radius covers 18000 people. A 2 mile radius covers 8000. A 1.5 mile radius covers 4500. A 1 mile radius, only 2000. A 0.5 mile radius has 500 people in it. Realistically, a person walking at 3 mi/h won't walk more than 0.5 miles to visit the local shop, and a person bicycling at 12 mi/h won't go more than 3. They won't, unless they are combining trips. If the shop is on the way to somewhere else, or a very short distance beyond their primary destination, they might go further overall. But pedestrian and bicyclist infrastructure is practically nonexistent anywhere in the US except for a bare handful of cities and suburbs. Many places don't even have sidewalks. Nearly everyone uses an automobile for personal transport. As such, the "local shop" is right there at the gas station. We call them "convenience stores". They are most often placed at the intersection of arterial roads. So if you are lost in the back streets of suburbia, you will never see one. It doesn't make sense from a planning perspective, but it does from a money perspective. When a developer subdivides a large property, they reserve commercial lots next to the arterial road, and build access roads past those into the residential lots. In theory, once the houses are 80% built, all that residential traffic will be flowing past the commercial lots at least twice per day, and a business will build there. In practice, the developer exits after 95% of the houses are built, dumps the remaining 5% and the commercial lots on a strawman company, moving on to the next subdivision, and those businesses never actually get constructed. So you end up with huge areas of houses and very few businesses. There might be one strip mall every 3 miles, filled with businesses that usually last a few months before failing from lack of customers. (The exception is the pizza delivery, which will be absolutely thriving.) Residential buildings simply have a higher profit margin. Think about that before you decide to trust the developer's "phase IV" plans, when you're buying in "phase I".
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Many places don't even have sidewalks. The USA would be a much nicer place if no new residential development could be built without sidewalks. It would only require a little vision on the part of planning & zoning boards, with perhaps a little empathy for children, the elderly, and others who can't drive.
VLM 11y ago
Economy of scale when constructing. You can usually tell the age of a burb by how big its zones are. Some of the newest burbs have absolutely huge, staggering, sized zones. I live in a burb thats a bit over fifty years old and there's no spot more than maybe 6 blocks from the arterial retail/commercial/restaurant strips? In some new burbs you can easily be over a mile from anything other than residential. I will say that when I was a kid there was a lot more to do in big zones because obviously there's more basements and garages and back yards and just plain old more kids. I mean, there's only about 200 kids in my current subdivision so with a distribution of ages its quite likely that there's no one to hang out with in the neighborhood for my own kids, whereas that's never an issue in a bigger zone where there's always a friend in the same neighborhood to hang out with. Some modern zones are so big that entire elementary school districts live within the borders of single zone! Obviously those kids always have someone to hang out with in the neighborhood. And of course the bigger the zone, the crazier the traffic on the roads between the zones, which sucks.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Americans are big optimizers. Our retail has gone big for logistical and economy of scale reasons. Paradoxically, this is how we are frugal while maintaining a nod to consumerism. For a complex set of reasons ( much of which involves how our tax system works ) , we tend to separate housing space from business space unless you're in a city where that grew up closer together. Suburbs are unnatural and inorganic, and that's what people either hate or love about them. This being said, there's frequently a "convenience store" that's sometimes closer than Big Mart. No veggies or actually even food, but they're there.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  Optimising what? Logistics for the supermarket? The British are big optimisers. That's why the supermarket oligopoly (Tesco, Sainsbury's etc) have taken over many -- perhaps even the majority -- of small, neighbourhood shops (Tesco Express, Sainsbury's Local etc). The distribution centres and large vehicle fleet that delivers to the big supermarkets is reused to deliver to the neighbourhood shops, and many people then walk (or cycle) to those shops. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+London/@51.5286417,-0.1015987,11z/data=!3m1!4b1?hl=en https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+... https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+Nottingham/@52.9520834,-1.163367,14z?hl=en https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+... Milton Keynes is generally regarded as a boring, US-style city: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+Milton+Keynes/@52.0334146,-0.7574871,13z?hl=en https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+... (I've never been).
  - adwf 11y ago
    Milton Keynes is probably the worst place I've ever been to in the UK. No easy walking around town. All chain stores, very few independent shops. No hailable black cabs for some reason, everything involved calling a minicab and waiting. Just a terrible city to be in without a car and a designated driver.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    Optimizing multiple things at once - logistics for suppliers, specified land use on adjacent parcels ( a nod to developers ) , but mostly tax revenue for the town where zoning happens. The British invented optimization in the WWII sense of the word, so yeah. I don't know Britain beyond what I read of it, but I understand there's the concept of "little Britain" as a thing so maybe that's why small shops exist. In Montreal, I know there are actual bodegas in the city center and American-style convenience stores in the 'burbs.

hydrogen18 11y ago

I don't know much about Michigan, but it could be due to zoning that you don't see any shops.

Ygg2 11y ago

Not really. The longer the distance traveled the more you buy per trip. It's universal foraging behavior.

shasta 11y ago
That explains why the mega store doesn't want a local shop but not why there is no local shop.
- steego 11y ago
  Many Americans don't see the value in a local shop because local shops tend to be more expensive and offer fewer choices. It's easier to consolidate your errands and hit a big grocery store and a big box store.
  - EliRivers 11y ago
    That conflicts with a different cultural "fact" I have about US citizens. They love convenience (for example, "convenience stores") and willingly pay extra for it.
    - VLM 11y ago
      Its a class thing. Middle levels have the money to burn and often prioritize time over money. Plus complaining about paying $3 for an apple at the gas station quickie mart is a rare and cheap conspicuous consumption opportunity for them. I only have about 2 hours "off" unallocated tonight and I'm not going to spend 1/4 of my time off today saving $2 on the cost of an apple by going out of my way to shop at the food store. For poor people its a poor people budgeting thing. As per the previous recent discussions on HN, poor guy has $3 in pocket, gas station has $3 apple on shelf, he buys it because 1) he doesn't have $5 to buy a 5 pound bag from the supermarket 2) no idea when/if he'll ever have an extra $5 again to spend on an extra luxury like an apple 3) travel isn't free when you're poor so bus fare and hours spent taking public transit to the store and time spent not working means that $5 bag is more like $15 total systemic cost and thats a bit steep for a poor guy who just has a taste for an apple today? Upper levels have their personal assistant / admin assistant buy the apple for them. Its all going to be expense-d and its a rounding error anyway and the admin assistant is in a hurry so fine here take this $3 convenience store apple and I need a receipt for that thanks. And thats how we love our $3 convenience store apples. Despite most apple sales being in 5 pound bags at the supermarket of course.
      - steego 11y ago
        > For poor people its a poor people budgeting thing. ... I couldn't help but read the rest of this paragraph in Cartman's voice.
    - steego 11y ago
      In the suburbs convenience matters with things people buy regularly. You see this manifested as large convenience stores with gas bars and large drug stores that also sell sandwiches and ice cream. Small independent convenience stores tend to lose out to larger ones that have larger gas bars, cheaper gas and more options inside. What's interesting is this trend seems to be reversing a little bit in clusters. Younger people are migrating back to the cities, and more developers in the suburbs are building apartment complexes with shops and restaurants mixed together, giving it the feel of living above a really nice mini mall. :)
    - HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
      Yes, but... The ultimate convenience store is attached to a gas station and has a drive-up window so you don't need to get out of your car. While the ones with drive through windows are rare, I'd be hard pressed to think of a convenience store within a 30 mile radius that was not also a gas station. As far as I can recall, I only see c-stores that don't sell gas inside cities.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Combination of zoning ordinances keeping shops away from residential areas and shops not being able to compete on price against the mega stores' huge economies of scale.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I think the assumption, which is so basic that other commenters don't bother to mention it, is that every family has two cars. Suburbs in US are car-oriented to the extreme. Having a car changes shopping habits, because you can bring back much more things with you in a single trip to shop.

mtbcoder 11y ago

In the Midwest, suburbs are designed and developed around the car and the "local shops" are generally located in a series of strip malls off the major roads. On the coasts and in denser populated areas, there seems to be a renewed push for more walk-able areas, public transit and such though.

narrator 11y ago
I'll tell you the real, but awful, reason why we have such restrictive zoning in the U.S. The idea behind zoning is to make sure that different classes and races don't have to see each other if they don't want to. Putting commercial retail in a residential area would give outsiders an excuse to be there. The whole "white flight" from the cities has left it's mark on zoning ever since the 1960s. IMHO, this is also the reason for really bad public transit.
- zrail 11y ago
  > IMHO, this is also the reason for really bad public transit. This is an undisputed fact, as people in those communities will readily protest the "crime train" coming through their neighborhoods.[1][2] [1]: http://lewwaters.com/2012/05/22/light-rail-likely-to-raise-vancouvers-crime-rate-again/ http://lewwaters.com/2012/05/22/light-rail-likely-to-raise-v... [2]: http://larslarson.com/would-you-trust-your-kid-on-the-crime-train/ http://larslarson.com/would-you-trust-your-kid-on-the-crime-...
  - pnathan 11y ago
    That's horrifying. 'specially as I thought Portland area had good transit!
    - zrail 11y ago
      Don't get me wrong, Portland has excellent transit. However, a very large number of people who work in Portland actually live in Vancouver, WA. Those commuters strenuously object to running light rail over any proposed replacement bridges for the more than 100 year old trestles that currently handle all of that traffic. In addition, commuters to the south of the city limits also strenuously object to light rail running into their neighborhoods.

mietek 11y ago

Apparently, it’s not permitted: > In North-American zoning, zones clearly specify which use is allowed on it. In general, zones allow only one or two uses. For example, a residential single-family detached home zone tolerates only single-family detached houses. Don't try to put a convenience store or a school in one, nor a duplex. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/japanese-zoning.ht... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
This is purely a suburban problem and typical of the short sightedness of suburban development, which often corrupts the political process because a mandated retail lot is one less high-profit residential home they can't sell. Here in the city, there are shops everywhere. Mix use residential is fairly common with retail on the ground floor and condos/apartments up top. This has created a glut of storefronts with varying results. Its nice to have all these shops, but the glut of small storefronts means much lowered rents than before so a lot of fly-by-night businesses take over, and in my opinion, hurt the neighborhood like pawn shops, yet another open 4am tattoo shop, yet another shitty independent cricket/boost reseller, yet another liquor convenience store, yet another e-cig store, yet another detailing/hand carwash, yet another gourmet-style restaurant that will fold in 12 months, etc. Desireable shops like Trader Joes or Nordstrom can't open in those tiny and no parking storefronts so its high margin retail junk. This isn't as common anymore -- thank god, but when I was a kid, every other residential block in Chicago had a corner bar. A few nice, but most just depressing places full of serious drunks causing problems all through the night. So yeah, being too liberal with business licenses isn't so great. So this kind of thing cuts both ways, but yes, in the suburbs its especially bad. But at least they have the roads and capacity to handle it and their shopping centers are massive, which is nice as you can park at a giant mall or strip mall and get everything you need done. I can't do that, I have no giant structures like this remotely near me. In the city, we need closer stores because of how bad traffic and parking are. If suburban driving was this bad then they'd have the political impetus to change zoning. tldr; city planning is hard and political.

maxsilver 11y ago

It's usually heavily frowned upon to setup a local shop in Michigan like that, and sometimes illegal. Retail creates undesirable traffic and crime (at least, that's their common assumption). The suburbs fight hard to keep that as far away from residential areas as possible. Sometimes they push this to the logical extreme conclusion -- zoning commercial spaces almost exclusively at the edge of their limits. Here's examples of the actual zoning permitted in Kentwood and Grandville, (suburbs of Grand Rapids, Michigan). http://www.ci.kentwood.mi.us/CityOfKentwood/media/files/original-files/planning/Maps/Zoning-Map-%2824x24-in-color%29-Oct2014.pdf http://www.ci.kentwood.mi.us/CityOfKentwood/media/files/orig... http://www.cityofgrandville.com/images/pdf/Zoning%20Map%20April%202010.pdf http://www.cityofgrandville.com/images/pdf/Zoning%20Map%20Ap... On both maps, you'll see almost all of the red (commercial) areas are near various edge boundaries, and there's little-to-no commercial activity allowed near any central neighborhood(s).

sliverstorm 11y ago
It's not for everyone (including me), but there is a certain serenity to a nice suburb with no traffic, small streets, kempt housing, kids wandering around, and faces you recognize. Corporate retail is the antithesis of that vision. A small gas station or tiny corner store is pushing it.

mattste 11y ago

Having grown up in Michigan, I can attest to this. It has made me want to abandon this state so heavily built around the automobile. Even downtown Detroit has wide city streets and few walkable areas. Ann Arbor, on the other hand, is pedestrian friendly, and one can manage without a car.

logfromblammo 11y ago

At a suburban population density of 640/mi^2 (1 acre/person), a circle with 3 mile radius covers 18000 people. A 2 mile radius covers 8000. A 1.5 mile radius covers 4500. A 1 mile radius, only 2000. A 0.5 mile radius has 500 people in it. Realistically, a person walking at 3 mi/h won't walk more than 0.5 miles to visit the local shop, and a person bicycling at 12 mi/h won't go more than 3. They won't, unless they are combining trips. If the shop is on the way to somewhere else, or a very short distance beyond their primary destination, they might go further overall. But pedestrian and bicyclist infrastructure is practically nonexistent anywhere in the US except for a bare handful of cities and suburbs. Many places don't even have sidewalks. Nearly everyone uses an automobile for personal transport. As such, the "local shop" is right there at the gas station. We call them "convenience stores". They are most often placed at the intersection of arterial roads. So if you are lost in the back streets of suburbia, you will never see one. It doesn't make sense from a planning perspective, but it does from a money perspective. When a developer subdivides a large property, they reserve commercial lots next to the arterial road, and build access roads past those into the residential lots. In theory, once the houses are 80% built, all that residential traffic will be flowing past the commercial lots at least twice per day, and a business will build there. In practice, the developer exits after 95% of the houses are built, dumps the remaining 5% and the commercial lots on a strawman company, moving on to the next subdivision, and those businesses never actually get constructed. So you end up with huge areas of houses and very few businesses. There might be one strip mall every 3 miles, filled with businesses that usually last a few months before failing from lack of customers. (The exception is the pizza delivery, which will be absolutely thriving.) Residential buildings simply have a higher profit margin. Think about that before you decide to trust the developer's "phase IV" plans, when you're buying in "phase I".

jessaustin 11y ago
Many places don't even have sidewalks. The USA would be a much nicer place if no new residential development could be built without sidewalks. It would only require a little vision on the part of planning & zoning boards, with perhaps a little empathy for children, the elderly, and others who can't drive.

VLM 11y ago

Economy of scale when constructing. You can usually tell the age of a burb by how big its zones are. Some of the newest burbs have absolutely huge, staggering, sized zones. I live in a burb thats a bit over fifty years old and there's no spot more than maybe 6 blocks from the arterial retail/commercial/restaurant strips? In some new burbs you can easily be over a mile from anything other than residential. I will say that when I was a kid there was a lot more to do in big zones because obviously there's more basements and garages and back yards and just plain old more kids. I mean, there's only about 200 kids in my current subdivision so with a distribution of ages its quite likely that there's no one to hang out with in the neighborhood for my own kids, whereas that's never an issue in a bigger zone where there's always a friend in the same neighborhood to hang out with. Some modern zones are so big that entire elementary school districts live within the borders of single zone! Obviously those kids always have someone to hang out with in the neighborhood. And of course the bigger the zone, the crazier the traffic on the roads between the zones, which sucks.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

Americans are big optimizers. Our retail has gone big for logistical and economy of scale reasons. Paradoxically, this is how we are frugal while maintaining a nod to consumerism. For a complex set of reasons ( much of which involves how our tax system works ) , we tend to separate housing space from business space unless you're in a city where that grew up closer together. Suburbs are unnatural and inorganic, and that's what people either hate or love about them. This being said, there's frequently a "convenience store" that's sometimes closer than Big Mart. No veggies or actually even food, but they're there.

Symbiote 11y ago
Optimising what? Logistics for the supermarket? The British are big optimisers. That's why the supermarket oligopoly (Tesco, Sainsbury's etc) have taken over many -- perhaps even the majority -- of small, neighbourhood shops (Tesco Express, Sainsbury's Local etc). The distribution centres and large vehicle fleet that delivers to the big supermarkets is reused to deliver to the neighbourhood shops, and many people then walk (or cycle) to those shops. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+London/@51.5286417,-0.1015987,11z/data=!3m1!4b1?hl=en https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+... https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+Nottingham/@52.9520834,-1.163367,14z?hl=en https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+... Milton Keynes is generally regarded as a boring, US-style city: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+Milton+Keynes/@52.0334146,-0.7574871,13z?hl=en https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/Tesco+OR+Sainsburys+in+... (I've never been).
- adwf 11y ago
  Milton Keynes is probably the worst place I've ever been to in the UK. No easy walking around town. All chain stores, very few independent shops. No hailable black cabs for some reason, everything involved calling a minicab and waiting. Just a terrible city to be in without a car and a designated driver.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Optimizing multiple things at once - logistics for suppliers, specified land use on adjacent parcels ( a nod to developers ) , but mostly tax revenue for the town where zoning happens. The British invented optimization in the WWII sense of the word, so yeah. I don't know Britain beyond what I read of it, but I understand there's the concept of "little Britain" as a thing so maybe that's why small shops exist. In Montreal, I know there are actual bodegas in the city center and American-style convenience stores in the 'burbs.