WE ONCE HAD STREETCARS LOOK WHAT THEY TOOK FROM US
These “take a train” crowd think that everyone in every city and every town has a subway system or even a functional bus system. It’s like the bicycle people who insist that I don’t need a car, I can just strap my kids to my back in winter and drop them off at school before cycling to work and stopping for errands and groceries on the way home! So easy! /s
If I didn’t NEED a car I wouldn’t drive one, and that applies to most people. But for some reason everyone on here is a 20something city kid with easy access to public transit
“These ‘take a train’ crowd” tend to be also the ones saying “build more trains, light rail, and tram lines, also bike lanes” but who are prevented from making progress at every turn by oil and motor lobbyists. They are very aware of the limitations but generally encourage it because it’s a good thing to do.
This is the most offensive and derogatory form of ableism. I’m reporting this and I’m tagging you as “Person who hates the disabled” and I am not going to spend even a moment thinking about how mass transit or pedestrian pathways might benefit an individual with mobility issues.
Please, add /s. I almost believed you.
See your comment brings up the big issue I have with the bicycle crowd. I literally cannot ride a bike due to disability , so ride transit right? If my city had a good and reliable transit system i fucking would! But it doesn’t, and it never fucking will. So yes I will give up the car and take transit every day, when pigs fly and my city has a good transit system.
Your way of thinking relies on the belief that transit is adequate in most places, and it sure as hell is not
Lemme strap my wife and kids to my back while I cycle them all to their destinations then head off to work 50km away in the dead of winter!
Bicycle people have no brain, they think everyone lives in California or some shit
I do this with light rail. Takes 6 minutes with slow walking included. It’s pleasant.
Especially in the winter. I live in Norway, so if I use a car I wait for the engine to warm up before driving. (It’s better for the engine.) This and removal of ice and snow easily takes more than 6 minutes. I’m really glad I don’t have a car.
Most of the world is not like Norway and having a car is a necessity not a desire
The fact people want to get in a car in order to get groceries is beyond me. I’m in Australia, where car brain is also very prevalent, but with many urban places good for walking and PT.
I live close to the shops, and go there multiple times a week because it’s literally right there. Driving and parking? Nah, I’m good.
Friends I have talk about ordering groceries so casually. I go onto these apps and see a 20% markup with delivery fees and I’m like what the fuck.
I live in Houston. We have a grocery store in town that has a big apartment block over the top of it. A friend lives there and he jokes that he’s taking the elevator to the grocery store any time I complain about traffic or parking.
Unfortunately, living in a posh apartment that’s conveniently placed over a nice grocery store means the price of rent is astronomical. So he needs to work as a highly paid attorney in the oil industry to afford to live in a place where he doesn’t need to use a car to get groceries.
American problems
Ideally we could just fucking walk to a small grocery store instead of having to drive to one. Also would increase jobs with more foot traffic.
Most Americans lost one or both of their feet to the diabeetus
Don’t forget polio, due to anti-vaxxers, it’s making a comeback!
If you are not disabled in anyway and still need to take a transport bigger than a bicycle to buy basic groceries, the design of the city you live in is fundamentally broken.
As a disabled person, thanks for remembering us. I’ll see these “just hop on your bike and pedal over!” comments and it’s kinda saddening.
There are disabled people in the Netherlands too. And they can move around the city in micro cars, mobility scooters, electric wheelchairs, etc… with confidence, because bike lanes network allows them to go anywhere, with way more autonomy and safety than in any other country.
That sounds great, but I suspect The Netherlands wouldn’t welcome me with open arms. Until then, I’m stuck in 'Murica.
I suspect The Netherlands wouldn’t welcome me with open arms
Because you’re disabled? Or because you’ve got an unseasonal tan or low-income?
From my experience, the EU is enormously accepting and encouraging of rich white migrants, regardless of their mobility status.
honestly, that’s worth the try :D But of course, it’s easy to always show the exception and ask “why aren’t you all doing the same?”. Decades of car centric politics will not be fixed easily, not with techbros reinventing trains, not in today’s 'Murica. It’s a shame, though, because there was a great streetcars infrastructure a century ago… maybe that’s the one thing America should bring back to be great again
Taking a train to the grocery store only seems absurd to people who have never experienced a really efficient rail system.
You get what you pay for.
I used to take the train to the grocery store. It was called the red line in Chicago
In Tokyo I’d hop on the subway regularly to shop. Not a big deal at all.
The only thing that was different was that you don’t buy two weeks of groceries at once.
This was something that used to put me on the pro-car side; if it takes me multiple trips just to get all my groceries from my car into the house, lugging all of that on a bus or a bike would be a nightmare!
But then I saw content from people like Not Just Bikes, and saw how people in places with good public transit actually live, and it hit me like a ton of bricks that if shopping was more convenient, I wouldn’t need to buy a week’s worth of groceries in one trip. I could just swing by a corner store for what I need that night or the next morning, and one or two bags are easy to handle on a train or even a bicycle.
as a Dutchy, this confuses me greatly
Trains solve traffic issues
Elon brings shame to autists everywhere by not knowing about trains
Gregory does not have enough trains in his neighbourhood
Elon brings shame to autists everywhere by not knowing about trains
Elon’s not actually autistic. He’s just terminally online and regularly high off his gord. Once he sobers up, he does a masterful job of rooking WASPs out of their retirement accounts and state treasuries out of their tax monies by doing his best Music Man impression.
yeah, the Netherlands is so nice with that, you bike to a station for 10 minutes and then its a 2 hour train ride to go anywhere in the country
why would I take a train when the store is 3 minutes walking diatance
That’s literally communism and also the cause of everything wrong with the economy, that’s why!
My township is going through this
Vandalism, threats, people screaming in public, and so on; all afraid that the new area being built having stores within walking distance is a government conspiracy to restrict people’s ability to leave
…all the existing parts of town have grocers and shops within walking distance
Driving is for free people, walking is for slaves! /s
Light rail. All the time. Train isn’t only Amtrak.
This dude jokes but when I lived in Harlem I’d take the subway to Columbus circle Whole Foods as it was significantly easier than commuting to the east side on 125 to pathmark.
Introducing:the tramway!
Wait until they hear about the Bus. But probably is for the best they don’t, their head would explode at the thought
Bro, I can walk 1 mile to the grocery store and 1 mile back. That’s roughly an hour including shopping. I have a disability on my right foot so I’m slow moving.
I can walk 1/2 a mile to the bus stop and spend another 20-30 min to the store, so around 2 or more hours.
I can drive there in 5 minutes.
Cars are not the solution and are terrible for the environment but many people don’t have other options
Imagine if you lived somewhere that your disability would be considered and accommodated for, so you were given an electric mobility scooter or other, more sensible and less dangerous transport for those one mile situations…
Ok, but imagine this: you work a mile or two from your house, with bus stops every two blocks, and they come every 5 minutes. That walk to your house passes a grocery store, several bakeries, a small hardware store, and most other places you’d need to go day to day. On one side of this main Street is a park, on the other is a few blocks of homes and businesses before you get to a parking garage next to the highway - all the roads inside the community have low speed limits and little parking, so there’s not much traffic.
If you qualify for handicap placards you can park on the street, a few parking passes can do the same, but are hard to get because they’re auctioned off. Most people leave their cars in the parking garage if they don’t need them, they might park near their building to unload large amounts of stuff, but after they take it back to the lot. People at the stores in the community don’t generally buy more than will fit in a personal cart or a backpack, because they’re so close and convenient
It’s actually way more convenient, because you don’t have parking lots everywhere. Instead stores, offices, and housing of all levels of affordability is all mixed together, so you just give priority to people who can’t walk far, and everyone else just has a couple staircases or a couple blocks further to go
And it’s not just a dream, I spent a summer living in a place that worked exactly like this
Your problem is with infrastructure
It should be designed for people who can’t drive
Generally those physically capable of driving are better off not driving than those who physically can’t drive
A mile on a bike should take about 5 minutes too.
It’s actually called zoning reform. Bring back neighborhood grocery stores you can walk to. Before I experienced it, I never thought about how convenient it is to walk less than 5 minutes to a grocery store almost every day and do little grocery trips instead of bit multi-bag struggles.
Bring back neighborhood grocery stores you can walk to.
This is actually probably more a federal antitrust/competition law thing than a local zoning thing. Otherwise it wouldn’t have happened nationwide. I found this article to be pretty persuasive:
Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.
. . .
Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them. It does, however, allow businesses to pass along legitimate savings. If it truly costs less to sell a product by the truckload rather than by the case, for example, then suppliers can adjust their prices accordingly—just so long as every retailer who buys by the truckload gets the same discount.
. . .
During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway.
With discriminatory pricing outlawed, competition shifted onto other, healthier fronts. National chains scrambled to keep up with independents’ innovations, which included the first modern self-service supermarkets, and later, automatic doors, shopping carts, and loyalty programs. Meanwhile, independents worked to match the chains’ efficiency by forming wholesale cooperatives, which allowed them to buy goods in bulk and operate distribution systems on par with those of Kroger and A&P. A 1965 federal study that tracked grocery prices across multiple cities for a year found that large independent grocers were less than 1 percent more expensive than the big chains. The Robinson-Patman Act, in short, appears to have worked as intended throughout the mid-20th century.
Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it.
That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. . . . Kroger, Safeway, and other supermarket chains followed suit. . . . Then, in the 1990s, they embarked on a merger spree. In just two years, Safeway acquired Vons and Dominick’s, while Fred Meyer absorbed Ralphs, Smith’s, and Quality Food Centers, before being swallowed by Kroger. The suspension of the Robinson-Patman Act had created an imperative to scale up.
A massive die-off of independent retailers followed. Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers, creating a “waterbed effect” that amplified the disparity. Price discrimination spread beyond groceries, hobbling bookstores, pharmacies, and many other local businesses. From 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers shrank from 53 percent to 22 percent.
The whole thing is worth reading.
Genuinely high quality post.
And yet another Reagan roast.
Wow, one more thing to thank Reagan for that I was unaware of. Thank you for the link.
It’s definitely both.
If you can’t have smaller grocery stores in neighborhoods due to zoning laws, what will be left is bigger stores which are going to be generally operated by large corporations.
That would only explain the phenomenon in urban areas that actually have zoning. Rural areas are suffering from the same thing, but don’t have zoning restrictions, so obviously that points to another cause.
Another way that Reagan really shit the bed, huh
It sounds like he knew what he was doing, and it worked as intended. “Holding back American businesses” indeed.
Thanks for sharing the article! It was very informative. I’m definitely going to remember it as the Robert pattinson law though.
In the US you’d be arrested for unlawful walking in a car only area, or something.
Would probably help with remembering reusable bags too. Instead of driving there and being like ‘oh no!’ you’re walking, and would realize you’re not carrying them with you.
I’m fine going to the supermarket for a medium shop every week or two but being able to walk to get milk for my breakfast (especially if I only realised I’d ran out in the morning!) was so nice.
Now I don’t live in town any more, it’s an 11-mile drive to the nearest shop so it’s more like a once a month shopping trip. Fresh fruit and veg? What’s that?
I beg these people to imagine a world where you don’t need to get in a vehicle to buy essentials.
Imagine? You mean remember? Like, surely, their ancestor’s memories to such but, yeah.
