Do Americans really drive everywhere?

40 comments

1. My house is not near work or the store.

2. Many do. There’s often no alternative due to distances and lack of public transportation.

3. There are exceptions of course (large cities with reliable public transportation).

   But yes, for the most part Americans really do drive everywhere because that’s just the way most towns, cities are built.

4. Because America is huge and we don’t have transit everywhere. Also, it’s really hot some places

5. Yes, things be far away

6. My nearest store is a dollar general that’s about 9 miles away from the home, and the road out there is a two lane road that’s only about 10 feet wide per lane, so walking isn’t an option.

7. Unless you live in a dense urban area then yes, driving is usually the only practical way to get around.

8. Hmm let’s my house is 3 miles from the nearest train station. We have a seasonal bus route that primarily serves tourists during the summer only.

   If I want to go anywhere but Boston itself, I have to drive. Even then I probably will drive to the train station. This is in an area with “good” public transportation in the US.

9. Not literally everywhere, but for most Americans driving is the only option to get most places.

   The country is very spread out.

10. Yes, I’m a 5 minute drive to a small store/gas station, and 20 minute drive to the nearest grocery store. 30 minutes to the nearest larger town. I prefer it this way because I like to have more land with privacy, and I really dislike cities. To me, I live a perfect distance away from everything.

11. Yep. Nothing is within walking distance.

12. Most Americans live in suburbs, which in the US usually means residential areas not served very well by public transportation, and not within walking distance of supermarkets, restaurants, and businesses.

13. Unless you live in a city you need some form of transportation. Unless you live in a very specific area that has public transportation leading directly from your place of living to your work (usually places outside of a city going into the city) then you have to drive.

    Most people don’t drive long, but yeah driving is needed for most Americans to get almost anywhere

14. I’m driving to my kitchen right now for breakfast

15. I’m sure you’re here from the brilliant front page post.

    Apart from what others have said there are weather/climate considerations, specifically in the summer and winter. It’s not uncommon for most of the US to be between 33-40C during the summer consistently with high percentages of humidity. A 20-30 minute walk would leave the average person drenched in sweat. Western Europe has a much more mild climate.

16. Outside of some major cities on the east coast and Chicago, yes. We just don’t have reliable public transportation

17. I’d be 60/40 driving. I live in a picturesque New England town. If I want a beer, a sandwich, to sit outside with a coffee and some fresh made little cake things, or to just peruse the general stores, it’s a 1 miles walk into town. Outside of that, it’s 10 miles to the next strip for the big boxes and chain restaurants and the like, and work is 20 miles away, so yes,,car for thst.

    Public transport to take me into the various cities south of me is a 20 minute ride north, so I never consider thst option

18. Many, many Americans – probably the majority – live where there is no or terrible public transportation, and everything is far away. If I wanted to use public transportation, I’d have a 12-13 minute DRIVE to the nearest bus stop. It’s like 7 miles of nothing but residential houses on the trip. The walk would take hours. And the bus itself is shitty shuttle bus service that goes to a few key hubs that are all miles apart, like the outlet mall, the grocery store, the train station, etc.

19. The US is huge (so walking is out), with suburbs and rural towns common (ruling out mass transit).

    For example, in the small city where I live, my commute to work via car is 15 minutes. By bus (plus walking to/from bus stops), it would be an hour, and that’s assuming the bus arrives at the perfect moment. Walking would be more than two hours. Bicycling would be 36 minutes. Faced with those options, I’m driving.

    That said, we do still have widespread use of mass transit in dense urban areas like NYC or college campuses.

20. Our towns aren’t designed to walk around. It takes about 15 minutes of driving for me to get anywhere that isnt a gas station, trying to go the same distance by foot is usually miserably hot (Florida) and dangerous because there aren’t many sidewalks. If you aren’t a grown man its a stupid thing to do because the people in Florida are all some level of crazy.

21. Yes absolutely. And it’s not just rural vs urban thing. In rural areas it’s a given you’ll be driving. Same goes for most cities and their suburbs. The exceptions would be NYC, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia and to a lesser extent Seattle and Portland.

    American cities for the most part are not planned the way European or East Asian cities are, big and small. Most people live in residential neighborhoods, and in residential neighborhoods in most parts of the country, you cannot build anything but housing. Because American cities are for the most part sprawling, neighborhoods are big and people live far away from places where they’d work or shop. For this reason American cities are designed around the car and there is car centric infrastructure everywhere. Cars are essentially required to get around.

    There isn’t really any viable alternative to driving. Wide roads, giant parking lots and a lack of sidewalk make most cities unpleasant to walk in. Our public transit is also severely underfunded, resulting in poor service at best and non existent at worst. On top of this, most people prefer to drive because there’s this BS stigma around public transit that it’s only for poor people and riding it makes you a peasant. All these factors combined is why people drive everywhere.

22. Yes. Everything is incredibly far. I work in Chicago and for work I usually take 30ish miles to work, 30 back. America is extremely large.

    Just for work today I had to drive 52miles to get to work which is 83km.

    My home is directly next everything I could possibly want. I still have to drive 3-5min to reach everything. The closest store to me is a Hardware store and that’s a 6minute walk

23. It depends on where.

    Living in a major East Coast city, I walk, take the bus, or take the subway. The buses run every 5-10 minutes and are free, the trains run every 10 minutes. If I wanted to go to NYC, I could take the train or at least four different buses (all of varying quality). I live within a ten minute walk of three grocery stores, an elementary school, multiple restaurants, a major bus depot and the subway station. I deliberately chose to live here though, because accessibility via public transportation and walking was extremely important to me. I think on an average day, I walk around 6 miles or so.

    Outside of major East Coast cities and Chicago proper (not counting Chicago suburbs/most of Chicagoland), then yes, everyone drives because it’s impossible not to.

24. >Why

    Because the typical US city has like… 1/10th the population density of the typical European city. For example, the city of Westminster in London has an area of 21 sq km and a population of 200k. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a fairly typical midwestern city, has a population of 140k… spread over 192 sq km.

    >Why

    Because our cities weren’t flattened in WW2 and our economy wasn’t in shambles. For a couple decades everyone could afford to have a couple cars and a house with a big lawn in the suburbs. It didn’t stay that way, but now it’s really hard and really expensive to use mass transit in cities that were designed around cars.

    If you know what to look for, you can see the phases of growth in satellite photos of any US city like rings in a tree. Old development (pre 1900) favored short, square blocks. Then you get into the long rectangular blocks of the war eras. Giving way to the planned developments of the cold war with their irregular but still mostly composed of through-roads. When the cul-de-sacs appear, the cold war is winding down. When the developments start having a couple roads in or out like a gated community, that’s the McMansion era.

25. I live in NYC and most people don’t own cars here. It depends on where you live.

26. I’m in southern Kentucky right now near Mammoth Caves. Lots of hills and winding roads would make this a very difficult bike commute even if there were no motorized vehicles at all. Things are spread out but traffic isn’t bad. It takes 10 minutes to get to the next town over

27. The nearest grocery store is 3 miles away from me and the ones I tend to frequent are 10+ miles away.

    US infrastructure is built around cars and has been since the 30s or so with a huge infrastructure project solidifying it that started in the 1950s.

    Remember, we are the width of a continent and for everyone who isn’t in one of about 5-6 major urban centers, a motor vehicle is the primary form of transportation because the distances otherwise simply do not make sense.

    Americans drive. We drive from our houses to our jobs, we drive to go get groceries, we drive to go have fun. It’s how our system works.

    I had a really bad power outage a couple of weeks ago and had to drive 60 miles to go buy a generator. I considered it a short drive considering.

28. Yes. When the United States was expanding its transportation networks in the 20th century, mainly in the 1930s and 1950s, the big three auto manufacturers teamed up and lobbied politicians to build this new road system to be centered around individual vehicles instead of public transit because they wanted to sell more cars.

    Yes, Americans really drive everywhere, even when they live in the middle of the city. Public transit is so wildly underfunded that, if there is a system, it’s usually shady as hell and takes forever. One time when my car was in the shop, it took 2 hrs to get somewhere on the bus that would take me like 10 minutes to drive to.

29. Yes. Yes we do drive everywhere.

    We don’t live and work in nice little villages with markets, doctors, restaurants and entertainment within walking distance. We have practically zero mass transit except in larger cities.

    The nearest grocery store is 5 miles away from our house in any direction. And in my case, the hills between here and there are too steep to ride a bicycle. I used to ride a motorcycle but that was for pleasure, not a mode of transportation I’d take to go shopping. My nearest job was 10 miles away. My husband’s job was usually 30 to 50 miles away. We drive back and forth daily.

    If you look on Google Earth you can see our interstate transportation roadway system traversing North and South, East and West tying major cities together. Where I live, some of it wasn’t completed until 50 years ago.

30. Yes, most of our cities are built for cars. Americans opt to drive even in cities with decent public transit. Automotive infrastructure requires a lot of extra space so everything gets spread out. Transit becomes inefficient in cities built for the automobile, it doesn’t work well in car centric cities. Just building more transit wouldn’t change Americans driving most places either. The cities themselves would have to shift to a different development pattern.

31. Visit the US. Then you’ll understand.

32. As opposed to what?

    American cities and urban areas like San Francisco have a high density of population and business with decent public transportation allowing people to get around without a car but that’s the exception not the rule.

    I live in Monrovia, a small city outside of Los Angeles. There are no trains, busses are generally for long distance travel, and the nearest grocery store would be at least a 30 minute walk in each direction and the temperature is frequently over 35 degrees Celsius. How else would I get around?

33. For as much shit as Americans get for being geographically impaired the rest of the world sure seems to have trouble comprehending how massive the US is.

34. How else am I supposed to get somewhere.

35. I live 7 miles away from a large city with, supposedly, one of the best transit systems in the country. I’m less than half a mile away from the nearest bus stop.

    It takes me 4 hours, round trip, to get to work on public transit. It requires two buses, two subway lines, and a mile of walking. The first bus only comes every 1 to 1.5 hours and sometimes it just doesn’t show up. Driving saves 2.5 hours off my commute.

    It is also almost twice as expensive for me as driving.

    In the past year or so we’ve had a guy dragged to death by a train, multiple derailments, a fire on a subway car, multiple incidents of violence, and concrete falling from the ceilings in subway stations threatening to brain the riders waiting for their trains. A young woman coworker of mine was assaulted on a subway car by a man who then blocked her from leaving the car.

    After the public transit authority shut down an entire subway line for a month, there are still slow zones throughout that subway line – and the others – that requires the trains to inch along at, idk, 5 or 10 miles per hour throughout long stretches. There have been enormous delays and it’s not unusual to wait 20+ minutes for a subway car to arrive – even during rush hour.

    There are few to no subway stations in the poorer areas of the city. Only buses, which can be unreliable and get stuck in traffic.

    I can’t get to a pharmacy, supermarket, convenience store, or anything else by public transit – even though those things are just 3 miles away.

    This is one of the best public transit systems in the country.

    So… I drive.

36. 37 degrees Celsius, 40 minute walk to the grocery store. Longer to anything else. With elevation. Nope, not going to happen.

37. It is absolutely true outside of large cities with public transit infrastructure. Here’s a few reasons.

    Suburbs are designed with cars in mind. Groceries, restaurants, and other stores are often too far to comfortably walk to (especially if it gets near 100°F with high humidity which isn’t uncommon). And if you plan on buying more than 2 or 3 bags of items it’s much more convenient to put them into the trunk than carry them 15-20 minutes.

    Domestic flights, while cheaper than international, are not cheap whatsoever. It makes sense to spend $100 on gas to get me, my wife, and our two dogs to her family’s place 6 hours away than to spend over 300 per person to fly. Plus I get to make sure that they are safe rather than trusting baggage handlers.

38. I live in one of the largest metro areas in the country (population 8M). The nearest train station is 9 miles (20 minute drive) from my house. The nearest bus stop is 2.8 miles away (1 hour walk), and is located in my local shopping center. That route doesn’t connect to the other city routes or to the train station, it just runs in a small loop, hitting a few other shopping centers, parks, churches, schools, hotels, and libraries.

    Tomorrow will be 108° (42C) with a heat index of 120° (49C). I barely even leave my house in the summer, let alone WALK. It’s insufferable hell 3 months a year, torrential rain for another 3 months, ice storms for yet another 3 months, with tornadoes sprinkled across 8 months and baseball sized hail drizzling through 6 months. Ive had hail total a car and had my roof ripped off in a tornado. In just my neighborhood, a 5 ft alligator was captured, coyotes and snakes are regularly seen, and occasionally the ever-elusive, but deadly, wild Texan Homo sapien is spotted. I’m not walking anywhere!

39. A lot of people can’t afford to live within walking distance of work if they stll have to be there in person. We buy at least a week’s worth of groceries at a time for our families and carts can’t leave the store. Trains don’t make sense in rural areas since towns are so far apart, sparsely populated and lacking in amenities. It rains. It gets cold and hot. And it gets snowy and icy in some areas.

40. Weird. I see lots of people driving in cars in Europe, Asia and South America, too,.