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.
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
Instant Teleportation when?
You likely wouldn't actually want that, as the way it works on star trek at least is to effectively kill you (by recording all your molecules etc then ripping you apart), move your molecules to the new place and then reassemble you.
There's no real way to do 'instant' teleportation like you suggest either as it most likely breaks the laws of physics, things have to move to get places, best you could probably do is very fast teleportation.
You teleport the groceries, not the person to the store. That would be silly
I'd settle for speed of light tbh
Yeah, though this is difficult for anything with a significant mount of mass beyond that of a photon. The closest scientists and engineers etc have currently got to anything close to the possibility of going very very very fast is the Alcubierre drive. However, that's still very speculative and probably nowhere close to being built.
The most impressive tech ioo that they can come up with for space travel and exists at the moment is Ion thrusters.
Yeah so I guess I'd always imagined that the closest you can really get given the laws of physics to instant travel would be disintegration+information transfer+matter synthesis. But matter synthesis is probably ruled out by the amount of energy required to do anything, and the complexity of correct assembly. Still, fun to think about.
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.
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.
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
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
People really need to commute for groceries? Like, I have the store 1 block away. Americans don't know they can walk?
Most Americans leave too far away from any supermarket, even if there were roads that could take you there, either by walking or cycling.
I say it's a business opportunity, why don't Americans just open a small general store in their residential areas? Not everything need to come from a supermarket, here we have people that literally sell you vegetables in a rented garage.
Seems like the only acceptable usage of garages for you people are tech startups and maybe teenager bands lol.
I hope the answer is not "due to some obtuse regulation, residential areas can't have business operating in any shape or form, unless is a tech startup or an ice cream truck".
something a lot of people miss is, that some people have to shop for more than 3 or 4 people, when I grew up we were 5 plus a somewhat big dog, you can't really do weekly shopping without some kind of help under these circumstances
I use public transport to get everywhere I can, which is pretty easy where I live, but having 4 full shopping bags on a tram sounds like a horrible experience
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