Edit: of course this is satire. The power of the reading comprehension devil grows stronger every day 😢
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Too many people dont recognize satire.
Considering reality do you blame them? This is hardly satire, just sarcastic pointing out (US) reality.
Yea. The Onion has been out-satired by reality lately, I’ll give you that.
When I played The Sims 2, the first thing I’d do is create a small public lot where everyone could get all their needs met and buy food and a cell phone (since starting characters didn’t have one). There were some oddities, since Sims get dirty quickly, I’d replace sinks with showers, and would make sure coffee was available everywhere.
Eventually, sims could walk from their home, rather than investing in a garage and a car or taking a cab.
Can this be done in sims 3?
No, that when the American government intervened to make cars mandatory in the Sims
Ah yes, they can walk to (checks notes) a gas station. Makes sense.
I believe he might be doing a comedy
To be fair, it has my next pack of smokes, beef jerky and beers, not just gas.
I often walk (checks notes) over 5km just to get to a convenience store.
hi European here!
what the fuck?
i’m here complaining how it’s hard to walk to a big shopping mall or an ikea and you’re out there without even a small grocery store around most corners? how do you lot do that? i’d seriously just starve to death if i couldn’t get up, walk for 5min, and buy food for a whole meal (or a frozen pizza)
We drive
Everywhere
In a way that can’t really be described to Europeans. If you live in a suburban area, people think you’re weird if you do anything other than use your car to get anywhere for any reason. Almost everywhere in the US is designed around the idea that you have a car and you use it every day.
This is about my city:
And it’s absolutely true. Our buses are mostly useful for driving to a Park & Ride/Transit Center and then to work and back. That’s about it.
This does exist in major US cities, especially the older (by US standards) ones. I’m in San Francisco, in a “good” neighborhood, and restaurants, groceries, bars, and multiple forms of public transit are all a short walk away. This is very different in car centric suburbs/cities though.
The contrast between eg Manhattan and Los Angeles is wild. First time in LA I went out walking, looking for a restaurant. The footpath vanished and suddenly I was on the edge of what seemed like a freeway. Relatives in Santa Monica were horrified to learn that I had taken a bus from my hotel downtown to visit them (it was perfectly fine).
I live in the EU but used to live in the US. In a nice part, too!
I lived like 400m from a small store. Never drove once. Insanely dangerous to walk on such a busy road with no sidewalks, no crossings, etc.
I walk a ton and bike ~80-100km/week now and don’t think twice about it.
They all want to live in a detached single home (is that how you call it?), so not enough density for a store to make profit. Glad I don’t live there tbh.
Single family home is the common term here.
I’m starting to think I need one myself because Americans are generally such loud fucking wankers that you need both a detached house and yards to get any peace.
Another thing is that the US is so car brained that nearly all attached homes (even townhouses in the city) have a garage somewhere. In my current condo, there’s alleyways with garages that face each other. The amount of fucking noise coming from the garage alleys make it impossible to sleep for lighter sleepers.
Probably doesn’t help that a lot is wood and panels, instead of brick or concrete. If you live near a busy street with insulated windows you can almost completely block out the noise nowadays (Although you’re still stuck with the pollution and can’t really open the windows), but technology can really counter some of those problems. But i wouldn’t fight the system on my own, so I probably would do the same in your position.
We tend to shop for days worth of food at a time.
Not a strong example of walkable communities, it’s quite pathetic in fact. Is this satire?
I think it has to be satire.
If it’s not satire, America has apparently regressed to a median state of “mentally challenged”.
I’m gonna have to keep saying this until it becomes common knowledge:
Yes.
You are basically correct, yes.
~30% of adult Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading/writing/vocabulary skills.
The mean, average American has between a 5th and 6th grade literacy level.
Despite the fact that almost 40% of US Adults have a Bachelor’s Degree or better… less than 10% can critically compare and contrast multiple news articles about the same topic.
We are very, very stupid, compared to any country with anywhere near the same GDP per capita.
~30% of Americans are functionality illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading level.
First of all, you’re a little high. It’s only ~21% of Americans who are functionally illiterate. Source
Second, the thing people forget about that statistic is it’s more or less in line with European countries like Germany, England. And we have better literacy rates than countries like Ireland, France, or Spain. Source
“Walkable” to a gas station is a strong indication of satire.
Could be like my neighborhood and that’s the closest ‘general store’ around. Of course unlike there we’ve got an actual grocery store and other services not much farther but you get the idea.
More walkable than some places. At least there is a side walk.
Sidewalks and 15-25mph speed limits go a long way. Would be nice if there was little community stores for staples embedded in the neighborhood, but that’s a foreign concept in American suburbs
I was just talking about this with my wife yesterday. It would be so nice if there was a small market in our suburban neighborhood
It isn’t there because of zoning practices separating living areas from businesses, which is often decided at the local level. Just gotta convince all your neighbors that they should be good with it too…
Be sure to add side walks with it. My childhood neighborhood now has a little strip mall with some snack shops. They are nice, but no safe way to walk to it. Short walk, but still.
You should engage locally to change your zoning laws to allow for that. Most places are only allowed to have single family homes and nothing else
Check out https://www.strongtowns.org/local if you want to get involved
This is … imo, not satire.
It is simply an example of the opposite of a walkable neighborhood/community, literally framed at such an angle as to capture the ludicrousness of it.
It is an illustration of the absurdity of car-brained NA city design.
But it isn’t exaggerated.
These kinds of developments, neighborhoods, are absolutely everywhere in the US, they are very common.
Even the use of ‘walkable’ may noy be satire: If there are sidewalks the whole way, well that would actually be uncommon, and many US policy makers and local city urban planners would actually, seriously, class this as walkable.
I am guessing folks from more civilized parts of the world are reading this as satire, because this seems unfathomably, beyond belief stupid.
… Welcome to America, we hate it here.
I mean it’s the US, could be true.
yeah we have sidewalks but they come with bullets and racists.
Walking while black is a criminal offence.
I can’t think of any reason someone would post this without a hint of irony, but nowadays it’s impossible to tell for sure
The tiny dot and 3.7 miles distance is a blatantly obvious use of irony.
This has clearly got to be satire, but the issue with “walkable communities” is the zoning. You need commerce close to those houses - a coffee shop, a bakery, small supermarket, dry cleaner, small doctor’s office, a couple of restaurants, etc.
Not a huge strip of stores, just a few every other block.
Ditch the school buses, and instead create actual bus routes that the kids, but also everyone else, can hop on and off to get around.
100% satire or comedy. 3.7 miles is not “walkable”. That’s 7.4 miles round trip. 2-3 hours of walking.
In my Australian town of half a million people (Canberra) our public transport is practically all buses, the same buses do the school services. We’re pretty car based but still I have 3 commercial places within 20 minutes of walking, covering medical, groceries, two butchers, hairdressers, a few independent restaurants, a few chain takeaways. Our nearest pub closed years ago, taxes on alcohol got too high for people to meet a few times a week at a pub
Every community is walkable if you walk enough.
Sidewalks would be neat though.
No kidding. I was on a bike ride yesterday through some areas where entire subdivisions, in fairly medium/high class neighbourhoods, had no sidewalks. Retired folks were taking their nightly stroll on the side of the road. I guess kids don’t get to play outside there, either.
When I was a kid, we played in the street. I remember one time it was 3rd and short. We had a play that was maybe 20 yards from the endzone. Play started, I got passed the ball, I dodged 3 kids, got passed them, and I was CLEARLY going to get to the endzone. But then the ref (one of the kids parents) yelled “CAR!”
And yes, a car WAS coming, very slowly, from way down the street. We could have easily finished the play, but CAR was yelled, which means all play stops. The ongoing play is ruled dead, and we re-do the play from whatever conditions we started the play on. In this case 3rd and short.
What would have been a touchdown, was ruled dead because some granny was driving 5mph from like 400 yards down the street. WE ALL KNEW IT WAS A TOUCHDOWN PLAY!!! I MADE AN AMAZING RUN!!!
But, those were the rules to keep the kids safe as we played in the street. Yes, I AM 41 years old, and still mad at some boomer from when I was like 7 years old. THAT PLAY WAS ALL MINE!!!
Anyways, we eventually scored, like 5 plays later, but still. I had my amazing run taken away.
So back to your comment, yes, kids used to play in the street all the time. Not sure if they do now. Probably too distracted on their cell phones and tablets.
You know I was watching an MLB game the other week, and I saw the camera cut to one of the Astros outfielders, just standing in the outfield between plays, on his cell phone? THE ASTROS!!! I don’t have proof, but I BET YOU they were cheating. Seriously! Who pulls out an iPhone during a baseball game and checks their emails?? I thought it was flat out illegal. If it’s not, it SHOULD BE!!!
Yes, I got sidetracked here. So what? I’m making conversation about THOSE CHEATING ASTROS!!! The 2017 World Series will always be vacant in my mind. Every player, coach, owner, hot dog vendor, everybody! They should all have been lifetime banned from baseball! But here we are. Eight years later. Many of them still involved with the game. Still celebrating the 2017 World Series as if they deserved it. That should have been retroactively stripped from them.
Holy shit, I related to this so much. I played street hockey with my neighbors kids back when I was a kid.
West coast in the US doesn’t really have this problem. I travel for work and it’s fucking insane how much the rest of this country will make crosswalks with no way to reach them.
Don’t need a sidewalk, just walk on the lawns where the sidewalk should be! As a bonus you get great cardio running from the people who come out with a gun to protect their carefully manicured lawn from being tread on.
Walking down highways is not advisable
Which is why racists love putting highways through minority neighborhoods.
Heh. I used to commute by bicycle, about 5 miles each way, but a stretch of it was on an 8-lane interstate. Up a steep grade in the morning, maybe 4%, with semi trucks blowing by at 60 mph. Down the same slope in the evening, 40mph past cars backed up at the light at the end of the exit ramp.
Some are more deadly than others though
Not just the danger of walking on a road where huge trucks drive at high speed, but also trying to avoid the roads by walking through fields or backyards and be shot by the property owner. In much of Europe there is some form of right to roam. Which means there are walking and perhaps biking trails throughout and the owner of any property has to allow people to walk there. They often even have to maintain the trail.
Near where I live there is a beautiful trail through a couple of farms. And the farmers are very welcoming, fencing off what is dangerous, but keeping a nice trail to walk. They have signs explaining what kind of things they grow and what animals they keep. And warning never to feed the animals, as they get plenty of the right food and stuff like bread etc. usually isn’t very good for them.
The US is so different, where a person simply walking and enjoying their surroundings is seen as a dangerous invader which needs to be killed.
Lol this has gotta be the satire
Of course it’s satire. I’m kind of shocked how many people don’t recognize it as satire.
Nope. My city is both trying to make the old streetcar suburb neighborhoods walkable again while also annexing places that are miles of road with nothing but sterile housing along it.
When develops buy some farmland, plunk a bunch of terribly build single family houses on it, sell it all off, and walk away the people who bought the houses find out that they’re not in a municipality. They wanted a house and low taxes and their own yard, but there’s no schools, fire dept, police, real water services, or road maintenance. So… They start begging to be annexed into the city to have the old downtown’s taxes pay for their services.
It looks good on paper to add land and population, plus shiny new roads don’t cost much for about 15 years, which is longer than most city council members stay on the council. It’s someone else’s problem when the bills come due. Our city council have been pushovers for decades and just keep adding shithole tax burden neighborhoods to the city and it’s all starting to die fast.
The post is satirically calling this walking, not that the situation itself is satire.
Ok. I live in a car centric city but never have lived where I couldn’t walk to a corner store. Even out in the suburbs when I was a kid, we could walk to the store, the library too.
Not to say there aren’t house farms in the exurbs, ringed by impossibly wide and fast roads. But it’s not so prevalent that you can’t avoid it.
I agree on zoning - there’s an empty lot a couple houses down, and another on the river, wouldn’t it be nice if I could build a pub so people didn’t drive to the bar? But truly, there are 3 gas stations/corner stores within a mile of our house, 4 barbershops, restaurants, 2 laundromats, a tattoo shop, a pharmacy, all without crossing any road with more than 2 lanes and 25mph speed limit. We just got a taqueria too, it’s so good! I just want a neighborhood bar because I hate hate driving somewhere for a drink!
And bring local pubs to America! Turn one of those shitty little McMansions into an Alehouse every eight square blocks and you’ve just solved drunk driving!
Not alcoholism and domestic violence though
Pff, like anyone considers those to be “problems” /s
Only a couple of hours to get a snack! You’ll burn off the calories as you get home!
I’m not sure if this Mason guy is being serious or not
Do American suburbs not have the concept of a “corner shop”? Somewhere you can grab some basics by walking there in 5 to 10 minutes?
No because they’re quite literally illegal in most neighborhoods. This is starting to change but developers don’t want to do anything different or innovative so they’re still rolling out the same moronic plans we have for the past however many decades.
They basically only exist in more urban areas, not suburbs. And, as someone else mentioned, they mostly sell garbage.
No. They exist, but they basically only have beer, cigarettes, chips, and candy. No actual food.
They’re also very badly overpriced.
Most are gone. T a combination of being zoned out and people being willing to drive 30 minutes to a big box store instead of walking 5 to a corner market nuked most of them.
I have a map of where they used to be in my city 100 years ago. (We do transit advocacy and need data on city history.) They used to be every 400m or so across the entire city, but now? Only a few remain.
Yes we have that concept. We just don’t often have that reality.
Yes. We have these, they are generally at gas stations! But as I said earlier, I have never been more than a few blocks from a corner store. They are not groceries though. Beer, diet coke, the Wawa by me has also reasonable food and fancy coffee. But if you need flour and produce, no. It’s only stuff you eat without cooking, ready to go things.
The Walgreens does have more regular stuff, cat food and tape, shampoo, etc. So may be closer to what you are thinking of. There is one of those near me also, but one vs. 3 gas station shops.
They don’t. It sucks.
I walked 3 miles today and carrying groceries in a plastic bag fucking exhausted me
They have to go 7.4 miles just to buy an energy drink and come back
