Comment by rayiner
20 days ago
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away
I live far enough out of DC where there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me. On the way to my parent’s house, there’s a bison farm. But I’m also a 5 minute drive to the closest strip mall (which has a CVS and several restaurants, both sit down and fast food). The ALDI is 10 minutes, and almost everything else, including the Apple Store, is within 15.
There are some suburbs where it’s 30 minutes to get to essentials, but most aren’t like that. Heck, the average one-way commute to work in Dallas Texas is under 30 minutes.
Even if we ignore freeways and such, a 15 minute drive at 30 mph is about 7 miles, which is a circle containing 176 square miles - or the entirety of the city of New Orleans or Denver.
A 15 minute walk is about a mile, so that's a 3.14159 sq mile circle - that's a small town or a neighborhood or two.
As much as I love going to bat for New Orleans, I will point out that people drive to Metairie all the time for things. The eastern part of New Orleans is also very spread out. (It's also not the 24/7 city it was before the pandemic.) A better comparison would be the towns on the Northshore.