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Here is our local cfa website. https://www.cfajoplin.com/
3 lanes now usually since they opened up a third one to take interstate traffic off, it used to be 4 lanes. They have staff take your order car side and then some lanes go to the window while others split off and a runner brings your food to you and you exit out the back of the lot.
I've only seen them done this way at Chick-fil-A but I've seen it in several around the country. Everyone else just does the merging lanes to cut down on wasted time at the order screen.
I haven't seen any either. But I'd gladly patronize a large-scale Chik-Fil-A drive-thru, especially when the weather is bad and I'm not feeling like cooking.
Chick filet is one of the most boring meals I have ever eaten. Just thinking of all the factory chicken being fed to all of the lifeless customers, makes my stomach churn
I have never got the fascination with Chick-Fil-A. It's a breaded piece of chicken on a roll with a pickle. It's more bland than bland. More vanilla than vanilla. To me it is barely distinguishable from any other fast food chicken sandwich. But it is praised as if it were chateaubriand (which, I confess, I have never eaten).
Haters gonna hate lol of all the fast food options, it’s definitely one of the best in my region. I eat lunch out pretty regularly and would take a CFA over a Subway or a Wendy’s any day.
Symptom of a problem. Until my city is walkable, I’ll be needing that drive thru and businesses will too. High traffic restaurants in the vast vast majority of America are driven to, so it’s either a stadium sized parking lot or a drive thru if you wanna stay competitive.
This has been a problem with our public transportation in my state, too. We have plenty of commuter trains into Boston, but many of the stations are only accessible by driving to them, and the lots are often either too small and not somewhere I'd feel comfortable leaving my car. So a lot of people end up driving anyway, which drives up prices for tickets, and gives the state a convenient excuse not to expand in those areas.
The only way to make St. Louis even remotely walkable is to make some serious investments in public safety first. People aren't going to walk in areas where they don't feel safe. St. Louis has a light-rail that people are rightly afraid to ride, because it goes through some really bad areas and there are no real safety measures.
I mean, I live there, so yeah. This isn't an unsafe area, it's just not walkable. But, those development dollars help pay for all kinds of things, including public safety.
Does anyone actually know of a successfully implemented walk-first community from the ground up post-1950?
I would like to see what a successful modern implementation is. Because all I see is bolt-on/jury-rigging and "there we have a bike lane now that is suicidal to ride on".
I still think the ebikes/e-scooters level of personal transport has yet to click in the US. You don't need a 50,000$ car to get a coffee two miles away in the summer, just hop on your e-bike and it feels legit nice to do. At some point the convenience and economy will probably kick in, but we'll see. EVs will get cheaper and cheaper as sodium ion production scales and if sulfur techs take off, that will be another 50% drop in price.
This is where I go to. I suspect the ven diagram of people who regularly get drive through fast food and people who think 5 min is a long walk is a circle.
It's not laziness; it's biology and an environment that enables it. We're all hardwired to expend as little energy as possible while gaining as much energy as possible - we've always been that way. It's just that now, we've got cars and drive-throughs everywhere.
Obesity's jumped up from 14% in to 42% in 60 years. It's not like a third of America suddenly got more lazy; we've cut down on the amount of exercise each person must undergo (in the form of walking) to complete their daily tasks.
Right. Everyone wants to blame individual willpower, but the amount of willpower expended by each person hasn't changed - the system around them has.
Telling people to just work harder than their parents and grandparents did is not at all effective.
Perfect for all the food companies. They need to justify the salaries of the food scientists they hired to figure out how to make the food as unhealthy, but addictive, as possible.
I returned to the US for the first time after living abroad for 3 years and found that even in a dense location like the Bay Area was amazed at how much parking was available outside of businesses. Parking and walking to multiple businesses was a chore and there was no space or planning for people who intending on walking places. Even for all of the cycling infrastructure that's there, it seems that designers never bothered to consider walkers.
It's really sad too since I'm used to walking and biking most places where I live now or otherwise take public transit since I haven't owned a car in almost 10 years. My health and weight is better for it, yet I felt incredibly unhealthy in the US having to drive everywhere just to get anything done.
You gonna buy a shittier house for money for me? Cause I don't think I'd like to spend more for less to still be in the heart of a city that isn't walkable at all. I can DM you my paypal if needed.
sounds like you got the shitty place all down yourself. I couldn't imagine how bad of an existence it must be to be beholden to a vehicle all the time.
this mindset is the actual root of the problem. folks complain, but expect others to take up the slack so they can just mayonnaise their way through.
Either you aren't from America or you grew up living in a major city, or maybe you've always had money, because I'm seeing a whole lot of misunderstanding of reality.
If you aren't from America or really don't have the necessary perspective, the biggest problem I see with foreigners is that they don't realize how BIG America is, and how easy it has been for us to just spread out over the course of our history. So aside from major port cities we've had almost no incentive to build in concentrated areas. This means for the most part there is not enough housing within walking distance of the districts where most jobs/shopping are. Even if we wanted to live close to work/shopping, there just aren't any places to buy there, AND because we're so spread out, public transport infrastructure is harder and more costly to plan. AND, even in places where residence are available, the vast majority of Americans cannot afford to live within walking distance of all their basic needs and income sources because all that housing is prohibitively expensive compared to our crap salaries. That's the reality of our situation. 90% of America isn't built to be walkable, and there are no magical affordable walkable places where we can just up and "move closer" to.
The size of the country isn't the problem. It is the size of our communities (and I use that word loosely)
Look at a random small rural town in say, northwest Ohio. Assuming it hasn't been a victim of sprawl, I guarantee you it's actually walkable. It will likely have a one-stoplight downtown with businesses and a park. All of the houses are built within a 15 minute walk of downtown.
What's the difference? That town was probably built pre-car. Whereas whatever "glamorous suburb" was probably built postwar and has expanded and expanded.
People like you genuinely cannot see the problem. It isn't your FAULT that our city planning is the way it is - we could go into how the car lobby sent us straight down to the fifth level of hell - but you are playing right into their excuses.
I grew up in unwalkable suburbia myself. Happily I escaped.
This part isnt even a car problem its a zoning problem.
Those small towns of old didn't mind mixing in some light commercial with residential. So while you might not see a huge supermarket in a residential area, you might have a little shop you can go to to get the basics, and a restaurant and\or bar.
We've seen a lot of mixed-use apartment construction, but we need to bring back mixed-use residential neighborhoods.
from murica and have made it a point to live in walkable areas for the past 35 years of my life
what we can't afford is to keep normalizing the commuter mindset
Then were back to his point about you spending your time living in a major city or having money.
I live in Arlington, VA. It’s an old town, and it’s great. Kinda walkable, for many things. Much more so than like the planned communities of Heardon or Chantilly. My rent is also $3500. And we’re on the lower end of the $ spectrum here.
Our son lives in DC. It’s very walkable. But again, it’s a major city.
How's the weather up there on that high horse? You seem to think it's trivial to just pick up and move with in walking distance of one's place of employment. Stop being so obstinate, you know that's not the case in the vast majority of the country.
Lol, only people in very large cities are struggling through car ownership. For the most part its pretty fuckign amazing. I drive an extremely comfortable air conditioned bubble with my choice of entertainment right up to my destination and can generally get to any point is my city within about 20 minutes. I'm not going to spend more money to have a less comfortable life to silently push for changes that will not happen in lifetime via that course of action, when I could just vote and donate to progressives and accomplish so much more.
He’s probably not brigading. It’s the rest of us who are downvoting.
We just don’t like idealists who look down on realists, and imagine that they’re better and that our lives must be in shambles. We’re doing just fine with 4 wheels, living in a world increasingly for designed for cars.
Sure, my ultimate utopia would be very different. But I ain’t making life hell to get there.
I was visiting America, and didn't have a car. I walked from my dad's house to Wendy's, about 2 miles, because I really wanted to try their burgers. When I got there the lobby was locked shut, and only the drive thru was open. They wouldnt let me walk through for insurance reasons, so they flat-out refused to sell me food. Ended up walking 4 miles to end up home still hungry. Fuck America. It's insane there.
Yep. Instead of Americans saying people from this country or that country are living in the future when they travel, they gotta start realizing that America is just behind
Drive through are very uncommon in the UK, but they do exist here and there.
There’s a McDonalds near me that has one, but it’s much quicker to park outside, walk in, order, and take things back to your car.
honestly this is true even at mcdonalds here in the US when using the app. Hell, if i hit "I'm here" on the app when i'm a couple minutes out, my wait will be almost nonexistent.
most chain restaurants here prioritize the drivethru so you wouldn't gain anything by parking and going in except a headache.
my choices are 1. sit in my climate controlled car with music i like and kick back and wait 5 minutes for food, or 2. park in a spot that is only availible when there is a gap in the drivethru line, walk through the heat/cold/rain, make my own order at a kiosk/stand in line for longer than 5 minutes, all the while listening to beeps and boops and screaming kids and youtube videos blasting out of phones, walk back through the weather and sit in my car for *another* 5 minutes waiting for a gap in the drivethu line so i can gd leave.
it's easily twice as long to go inside. while you wait for food you can look out the window and see the car that would've been in front of you leave the lot and drive away with their food, having only needed to roll down their window for 10 seconds.
there's honestly zero reason to go inside unless you are on foot or enjoy the suffering.
That's not true, if the drive-thru is more than 4 or 5 cars long, it could easily stall on a big/complicated order.
The lobby can process quick orders in parallel while the complicated ones are worked on.
I don't know where these people are where going in is quicker. This used to be true many years ago at some places, but everywhere has become faster in the drive-thru and practically ignore the people inside.
my city improved. IN SC, my city seemed pretty much hostile to bikes. Good luck finding a bike path and no stores had bike racks to lock your bike up. We now have bike lanes, we even have random bike maintenance stations and stores have racks now, its nicer.
Id love me some barsolona style walkable cities and do think it would help a sizeable amount but people use drive through for many reasons, often time. and also giving people a betting option doesnt mean they will use it. In many cities with great public trans, people still have cars for every member of the family. We put up car pooling lanes as a hint in the 90s, but they didnt increase car pooling as much as hoped. People who already pooled got to use the lane and only a few new folks joined them. More people cheat.
Most my friends, will drive to the corner store despite it is very walkable. despite they are a bit left and are concerned with emissions and all that. They still fire up the car to drive a mile to the convenience store.
That drive through overhead photo shows the problem: the queue in a drive through can only take 1-2 orders at a time.
Inside the store, the cashier can take multiple orders (3-6) at a time, and the kitchen can process them in parallel.
If there is an "outlier" order that takes a long time (custom cooking / ingredients) versus orders that can be processed quickly, the outlier "stalls" the pipeline/queue. In the store, the slow order would be worked around and other orders fulfilled while the difficult one is performed.
It is nuts that nobody drives to the parking lot around the queue, parks, walks in, and bypasses the line.
I have come to loathe drivethrus. I hate how anti-social it is, how insular it is, how it psychologically trains people to be lazy and inactive, and of course the car-centric imposition it forces. If I'm in a long, stalled drivethru, it feels like a cage. I will almost always park and walk in and order and walk out, and if there is any line, I'm pretty sure it is faster, since I usually get my order within 1-2 cars in drive thru.
My partner always has a laundry list of special needs on her order, and of course they mess something up and she wails about it. If you go inside, you have time to inspect the order and have them do the inevitable fix. But she loves the drivethru.
There was a joke about silicon valley being dedicated to serving the needs of the socially inept shut-in single male programmer about 10 years ago. It was pretty much dead on.
I'm not the most social person because I was bullied heavily as a kid, I was borderline agorophobic and palpably fearful of people, but being active/exercising/athletic saved me in the long run from being a shut-in. Strangely once I had a kid I truly ceased caring what people thought about me and now I can talk to strangers much more easily, and things have flipped: I now notice how antisocial and fearful/distrustful most people are.
But being fearful/distrustful as a default stance makes others immediately fearful/distrustful. This is the pernicious effect of political manipulation and heightening is having on the world, I see it every day. Strange thing is I now live in a very rural area with a lot of Republicans, and they can't really get along well with each other because of the fomented mass distrust even in a lily white 60-70% Republican town.
Anyway, the point is I think we need a new activism: one of simple, polite interaction with other people. I almost take pleasure in a simple polite interaction with people and service workers, with a quick conversation about how things are going or a shared laugh about something human like a fumble or some other human experience that modern society wants to pretend doesn't happen.
That interaction is the basis of what "walkability" really means as a community: a forced series of face-to-face interactions that brings more trust and faith that the people around you are "good" people. You won't build that with walls of steel and houses with fences in suburbs. It is apparent that the "community" in suburbs is simply social inertia from previous generations that had real community, and a bit siphons off every year.
The more I learn about how extensive American car culture is, the more grateful I am that Canada didn't have the funds to build our road infrastructure as prolifically as they did.
I would contend they do not explain everything wrong with American cities. I was just on the Portland OR sub and that place is filled with complaints about homeless encampments, fentanyl junkies roaming the streets and the inability of their court system to process criminal charges due to a massive shortage of public defenders. I don’t think mega drive throughs explain that.
Mega drive through is a major sprout of tumour at the heart of American urban problems. A perfect symptom of well understood issues if you will.
The average monthly cost of owning a car has gone beyond $1,000 in the US and for the vast majority of people it is an absolute necessity. This reduces disposable income and eats away at the ability to accumulate wealth
Braindead resistance to mixed zoning helps keep the rent high. Lack of at least medium density housing as well.
Remove literally crippling car dependency and make 4/5 family apartment buildings a common thing and watch homelessness plummet, among other things.
It's a miracle you don't have more homeless people given the fact everyone literally needs a car (an ever depreciating asset prone to major breakdowns).
> and make 4/5 family apartment buildings a common thing
Lol - literally no one wants to live in cheap high density stick-built housing if they can afford not to.
>Lol - literally no one wants to live in cheap high density stick-built housing
This is absolutely untrue.
>if they can afford not to
Homeless people, housing crisis, housing affordability, homeless people, housing crisis, housing affordability ... I just can't shake it, these phrases keep haunting me.
And all those people who would live in them would move out for single family housing the moment they had the opportunity and resources. This kind of housing may be a temporary fix for deeper societal issues, but it will never be the foundation of a "walkable" urban panacea because living in them fucking sucks compared to single family
Part of the problem is that high-density apartment design has been centered around cost rather than quality for so long, people don't have any idea of what a GOOD urban apartment can look like.
The only things a SHF can have that an apartment cannot have physically, is a YARD. Everything else, hypothetically, you can have in an apartment design. You can build thicker walls to have privacy, you can build larger spaces. You can do everything else AND still build something more efficient than a single home.
There are MANY people who'd be willing to give up a yard and still have a place to call home, that isn't a huge use of space in a community.
Having done both, I've much preferred living in apartments downtown where I can easily walk to everything cool to living in a single-family in a suburb. The suburb is boring and bland and I have to drive everywhere. The city is vibrant and interesting and I can walk to a ton of different restaurants, the grocery store, my friends, etc.
Ask literally any European and they'll agree.
Yeah, that's why well off people don't live in cities as we all know. It's just the poorest of the poor.
Such places don't exist in the US or Canada nor have they ever existed.
bro.
my commute is 3 minutes long, by bike. across one street from my building there is a strip mall with a grocery store, pharmacy, several clinics, a dentist, a barber and basically every other kind of store or service you might need in the regular course of life. across the other street there's a 24 hour convenience store and a cool little beer bar. 2 blocks in one direction from my apartment is one of our city's high streets, more shopping, more bars and theatres and the like. 17 blocks in the other is the arena and brand new entertainment district, city hall, the museum, the art gallery, *another* high street (with a farmer's market in the summer) and the downtown mall.
i mentioned my bike earlier? i don't own a car. don't need one, i live in a dense neighborhood downtown with protected bike lanes. i commute nearly everywhere by bike, no matter the weather (i live in one of the coldest cities in the world, btw.) saves me like $1000/month. i don't pay for gas, i don't pay for parking, i don't pay for insurance, and for the price of one monthly car payment, i can give my bike year-round top-notch maintenance, at the bike shop no less.
don't need a gym membership either. i bike like 150km a month just going places, to say nothing of the pleasure rides. i'm in my 40s and still look like i'm 25.
you don't want any of that, fine. to each their own. but i *very much do*. i want it all and i won't settle for anything less. far from the only one of my kind, btw.
> i live in one of the coldest cities in the world, btw.
You live in Edmonton. Talk to me about cold when you're living in Fairbanks. You would straight up die biking everywhere in Tuscon under the heat dome, at the other end of the spectrum.
> you don't want any of that, fine. to each their own. but i very much do. i want it all and i won't settle for anything less. far from the only one of my kind, btw.
Yes, yes, you're a fit-privileged self-centered douche and old people or disabled people can go screw themselves as far as you're concerned. God forbid someone have to go pick up a week's groceries for a family of seven or eight in an area with hills. I hope you think about your post when you have your first procedure, or autoimmune issue, or ACL tear, or heatstroke, and you actually see what everyone else is dealing with their entire lives.
Lol Edmonton routinely posts lower temps than Fairbanks and at least once a winter we are literally the coldest place in the world. I clock a least a few minus 40 commutes every year. And Tucson, AZ? The cycling capital of Arizona? That Tucson?
And I'm not saying that because I'm some super hero, as the to the rest of that load of bullshit you just dropped off. I have one bad knee already in fact, and I see people worse off physically than me in the bike lanes every day. You can go 15 km/h no problem sitting upright riding a 1 speed cruiser. Cycling is easy, ebikes make it easier.
But of course, none of that is relevant at all because I'm replying to a guy who said *nobody wants* my lifestyle and only live it because they can't afford it. It literally says in my post "to each their own" you dipshit.
Seems like you're a little jealous, I don't blame you, but that's not my fault or my problem. Vote in local elections. Read strong towns.
There are a few US cities where your options are an apartment like that, a high rise apt, being a multimillionaire, or living the inexpensive single family home dream between a trap house and a drug den lol.
And yeah, if we didn't effectively subsidize the suburbs in the US with car infrastructure, condos and apartments of that type would be an attractive option.
The most American of responses.
"You've suggested something different, and at no point did you imply that I have to completely upend my way of life, but I'm going to pretend you did so that I'm a victim"
Fuck off.
Fully agree. A willingness and ability to enforce public order and provide sufficient accommodation for the population are also necessary to support quality of life in the cities.
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Can someone show me a photo of these 3 and four lane drive thru's? I've only seen two that merge into one at the window.
I did see one that had 3. It was a McDonald's and someplace on the interstate last year
Here is our local cfa website. https://www.cfajoplin.com/ 3 lanes now usually since they opened up a third one to take interstate traffic off, it used to be 4 lanes. They have staff take your order car side and then some lanes go to the window while others split off and a runner brings your food to you and you exit out the back of the lot. I've only seen them done this way at Chick-fil-A but I've seen it in several around the country. Everyone else just does the merging lanes to cut down on wasted time at the order screen.
[Here's](https://www.qsrmagazine.com/operations/fast-food/chick-fil-a-is-building-a-four-lane-drive-thru-for-75-cars/) an article with one.
That's a rendering
Fucking AI got me again!
I haven't seen any either. But I'd gladly patronize a large-scale Chik-Fil-A drive-thru, especially when the weather is bad and I'm not feeling like cooking.
Chick filet is one of the most boring meals I have ever eaten. Just thinking of all the factory chicken being fed to all of the lifeless customers, makes my stomach churn
I have never got the fascination with Chick-Fil-A. It's a breaded piece of chicken on a roll with a pickle. It's more bland than bland. More vanilla than vanilla. To me it is barely distinguishable from any other fast food chicken sandwich. But it is praised as if it were chateaubriand (which, I confess, I have never eaten).
Haters gonna hate lol of all the fast food options, it’s definitely one of the best in my region. I eat lunch out pretty regularly and would take a CFA over a Subway or a Wendy’s any day.
Not everyone wants a super greasy, breaded amalgamation for fast food. Chick-fil-A does it’s job well. A solid fast chicken sandwich.
Soulless, not solid.
/r/im14andthisisdeep
The fact that this upsets you makes me love it even more.
Gross
Symptom of a problem. Until my city is walkable, I’ll be needing that drive thru and businesses will too. High traffic restaurants in the vast vast majority of America are driven to, so it’s either a stadium sized parking lot or a drive thru if you wanna stay competitive.
This has been a problem with our public transportation in my state, too. We have plenty of commuter trains into Boston, but many of the stations are only accessible by driving to them, and the lots are often either too small and not somewhere I'd feel comfortable leaving my car. So a lot of people end up driving anyway, which drives up prices for tickets, and gives the state a convenient excuse not to expand in those areas.
You and everyone else want drive-through train stations, I will let the city planners know.
This is also in St. Louis, which is notoriously car driven. This was never a walkable area, and was a place in need of redevelopment and investment.
The only way to make St. Louis even remotely walkable is to make some serious investments in public safety first. People aren't going to walk in areas where they don't feel safe. St. Louis has a light-rail that people are rightly afraid to ride, because it goes through some really bad areas and there are no real safety measures.
I mean, I live there, so yeah. This isn't an unsafe area, it's just not walkable. But, those development dollars help pay for all kinds of things, including public safety.
Does anyone actually know of a successfully implemented walk-first community from the ground up post-1950? I would like to see what a successful modern implementation is. Because all I see is bolt-on/jury-rigging and "there we have a bike lane now that is suicidal to ride on". I still think the ebikes/e-scooters level of personal transport has yet to click in the US. You don't need a 50,000$ car to get a coffee two miles away in the summer, just hop on your e-bike and it feels legit nice to do. At some point the convenience and economy will probably kick in, but we'll see. EVs will get cheaper and cheaper as sodium ion production scales and if sulfur techs take off, that will be another 50% drop in price.
Also, the more people that are fat and lazy the more people that don’t care as much.
This is where I go to. I suspect the ven diagram of people who regularly get drive through fast food and people who think 5 min is a long walk is a circle.
It's not laziness; it's biology and an environment that enables it. We're all hardwired to expend as little energy as possible while gaining as much energy as possible - we've always been that way. It's just that now, we've got cars and drive-throughs everywhere. Obesity's jumped up from 14% in to 42% in 60 years. It's not like a third of America suddenly got more lazy; we've cut down on the amount of exercise each person must undergo (in the form of walking) to complete their daily tasks.
The big uptick was the early 80s with the anti dietary fat craze. Obesity skyrocketed with the transition to added sugar.
Right. Everyone wants to blame individual willpower, but the amount of willpower expended by each person hasn't changed - the system around them has. Telling people to just work harder than their parents and grandparents did is not at all effective.
It's almost as if those solutions to societal level issues aren't made in good faith
An excuse to feel smug and superior while pretending to care and empathize, I agree.
Or the 1950s when the food and sugar manufacturers literally PURCHASED CONGRESS. We never had a chance.
Maybe, but that’s still NOT good lol.
Of course it's not good! But it's a systemic problem, not an individual willpower problem.
It’s a bit of both!
But now we can all sit in cars and eat fast food while downing Ozempic to keep the weight off. It’s the perfect solution.
Perfect for all the food companies. They need to justify the salaries of the food scientists they hired to figure out how to make the food as unhealthy, but addictive, as possible.
I returned to the US for the first time after living abroad for 3 years and found that even in a dense location like the Bay Area was amazed at how much parking was available outside of businesses. Parking and walking to multiple businesses was a chore and there was no space or planning for people who intending on walking places. Even for all of the cycling infrastructure that's there, it seems that designers never bothered to consider walkers. It's really sad too since I'm used to walking and biking most places where I live now or otherwise take public transit since I haven't owned a car in almost 10 years. My health and weight is better for it, yet I felt incredibly unhealthy in the US having to drive everywhere just to get anything done.
Americans will still drive because they atrophied their walking muscles!
until you start walking your city won't see the need for walk ability everything is walkable
I'm not walking 6 miles for a burger, 10 for a run of groceries or 36 to go to work. Won't be me or anyone near me that makes that change.
then apparently you need to leave the suburbs. a car warrior is always gonna car
What is a car warrior?
someone who treats their vehicle as an extension of their body and are unable to function without it
You gonna buy a shittier house for money for me? Cause I don't think I'd like to spend more for less to still be in the heart of a city that isn't walkable at all. I can DM you my paypal if needed.
sounds like you got the shitty place all down yourself. I couldn't imagine how bad of an existence it must be to be beholden to a vehicle all the time. this mindset is the actual root of the problem. folks complain, but expect others to take up the slack so they can just mayonnaise their way through.
Either you aren't from America or you grew up living in a major city, or maybe you've always had money, because I'm seeing a whole lot of misunderstanding of reality. If you aren't from America or really don't have the necessary perspective, the biggest problem I see with foreigners is that they don't realize how BIG America is, and how easy it has been for us to just spread out over the course of our history. So aside from major port cities we've had almost no incentive to build in concentrated areas. This means for the most part there is not enough housing within walking distance of the districts where most jobs/shopping are. Even if we wanted to live close to work/shopping, there just aren't any places to buy there, AND because we're so spread out, public transport infrastructure is harder and more costly to plan. AND, even in places where residence are available, the vast majority of Americans cannot afford to live within walking distance of all their basic needs and income sources because all that housing is prohibitively expensive compared to our crap salaries. That's the reality of our situation. 90% of America isn't built to be walkable, and there are no magical affordable walkable places where we can just up and "move closer" to.
The size of the country isn't the problem. It is the size of our communities (and I use that word loosely) Look at a random small rural town in say, northwest Ohio. Assuming it hasn't been a victim of sprawl, I guarantee you it's actually walkable. It will likely have a one-stoplight downtown with businesses and a park. All of the houses are built within a 15 minute walk of downtown. What's the difference? That town was probably built pre-car. Whereas whatever "glamorous suburb" was probably built postwar and has expanded and expanded. People like you genuinely cannot see the problem. It isn't your FAULT that our city planning is the way it is - we could go into how the car lobby sent us straight down to the fifth level of hell - but you are playing right into their excuses. I grew up in unwalkable suburbia myself. Happily I escaped.
This part isnt even a car problem its a zoning problem. Those small towns of old didn't mind mixing in some light commercial with residential. So while you might not see a huge supermarket in a residential area, you might have a little shop you can go to to get the basics, and a restaurant and\or bar. We've seen a lot of mixed-use apartment construction, but we need to bring back mixed-use residential neighborhoods.
from murica and have made it a point to live in walkable areas for the past 35 years of my life what we can't afford is to keep normalizing the commuter mindset
Then were back to his point about you spending your time living in a major city or having money. I live in Arlington, VA. It’s an old town, and it’s great. Kinda walkable, for many things. Much more so than like the planned communities of Heardon or Chantilly. My rent is also $3500. And we’re on the lower end of the $ spectrum here. Our son lives in DC. It’s very walkable. But again, it’s a major city.
TIL the best way to win people over to your side is to be a sanctimonious asshole to them. Great job!
How's the weather up there on that high horse? You seem to think it's trivial to just pick up and move with in walking distance of one's place of employment. Stop being so obstinate, you know that's not the case in the vast majority of the country.
Lol, only people in very large cities are struggling through car ownership. For the most part its pretty fuckign amazing. I drive an extremely comfortable air conditioned bubble with my choice of entertainment right up to my destination and can generally get to any point is my city within about 20 minutes. I'm not going to spend more money to have a less comfortable life to silently push for changes that will not happen in lifetime via that course of action, when I could just vote and donate to progressives and accomplish so much more.
aren't you just an entitled little person... and apparently with multiple accounts so you can brigade!
Lmao, sure thing buddy, oh and I'm actually quite large.
large Marge
He’s probably not brigading. It’s the rest of us who are downvoting. We just don’t like idealists who look down on realists, and imagine that they’re better and that our lives must be in shambles. We’re doing just fine with 4 wheels, living in a world increasingly for designed for cars. Sure, my ultimate utopia would be very different. But I ain’t making life hell to get there.
I was visiting America, and didn't have a car. I walked from my dad's house to Wendy's, about 2 miles, because I really wanted to try their burgers. When I got there the lobby was locked shut, and only the drive thru was open. They wouldnt let me walk through for insurance reasons, so they flat-out refused to sell me food. Ended up walking 4 miles to end up home still hungry. Fuck America. It's insane there.
We are a country run by lawyers. Everyone is afraid of being sued, and for good reason, because they easily could be for just about anything.
It's sad. America is a country with such incredible potential, and such incredible, consistent failure to reach a fraction of that potential
Yep. Instead of Americans saying people from this country or that country are living in the future when they travel, they gotta start realizing that America is just behind
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I lived in America for 25 fucking years. It's gotten far more shit since I left. Go suck a dick.
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Your country sucks. Cope harder.
Drive through are very uncommon in the UK, but they do exist here and there. There’s a McDonalds near me that has one, but it’s much quicker to park outside, walk in, order, and take things back to your car.
honestly this is true even at mcdonalds here in the US when using the app. Hell, if i hit "I'm here" on the app when i'm a couple minutes out, my wait will be almost nonexistent.
Yup snap here too in the midlands. A maccies near my gym and so much quicker to walk in and collect
most chain restaurants here prioritize the drivethru so you wouldn't gain anything by parking and going in except a headache. my choices are 1. sit in my climate controlled car with music i like and kick back and wait 5 minutes for food, or 2. park in a spot that is only availible when there is a gap in the drivethru line, walk through the heat/cold/rain, make my own order at a kiosk/stand in line for longer than 5 minutes, all the while listening to beeps and boops and screaming kids and youtube videos blasting out of phones, walk back through the weather and sit in my car for *another* 5 minutes waiting for a gap in the drivethu line so i can gd leave. it's easily twice as long to go inside. while you wait for food you can look out the window and see the car that would've been in front of you leave the lot and drive away with their food, having only needed to roll down their window for 10 seconds. there's honestly zero reason to go inside unless you are on foot or enjoy the suffering.
That's not true, if the drive-thru is more than 4 or 5 cars long, it could easily stall on a big/complicated order. The lobby can process quick orders in parallel while the complicated ones are worked on.
I don't know where these people are where going in is quicker. This used to be true many years ago at some places, but everywhere has become faster in the drive-thru and practically ignore the people inside.
my city improved. IN SC, my city seemed pretty much hostile to bikes. Good luck finding a bike path and no stores had bike racks to lock your bike up. We now have bike lanes, we even have random bike maintenance stations and stores have racks now, its nicer. Id love me some barsolona style walkable cities and do think it would help a sizeable amount but people use drive through for many reasons, often time. and also giving people a betting option doesnt mean they will use it. In many cities with great public trans, people still have cars for every member of the family. We put up car pooling lanes as a hint in the 90s, but they didnt increase car pooling as much as hoped. People who already pooled got to use the lane and only a few new folks joined them. More people cheat. Most my friends, will drive to the corner store despite it is very walkable. despite they are a bit left and are concerned with emissions and all that. They still fire up the car to drive a mile to the convenience store.
That drive through overhead photo shows the problem: the queue in a drive through can only take 1-2 orders at a time. Inside the store, the cashier can take multiple orders (3-6) at a time, and the kitchen can process them in parallel. If there is an "outlier" order that takes a long time (custom cooking / ingredients) versus orders that can be processed quickly, the outlier "stalls" the pipeline/queue. In the store, the slow order would be worked around and other orders fulfilled while the difficult one is performed. It is nuts that nobody drives to the parking lot around the queue, parks, walks in, and bypasses the line. I have come to loathe drivethrus. I hate how anti-social it is, how insular it is, how it psychologically trains people to be lazy and inactive, and of course the car-centric imposition it forces. If I'm in a long, stalled drivethru, it feels like a cage. I will almost always park and walk in and order and walk out, and if there is any line, I'm pretty sure it is faster, since I usually get my order within 1-2 cars in drive thru. My partner always has a laundry list of special needs on her order, and of course they mess something up and she wails about it. If you go inside, you have time to inspect the order and have them do the inevitable fix. But she loves the drivethru. There was a joke about silicon valley being dedicated to serving the needs of the socially inept shut-in single male programmer about 10 years ago. It was pretty much dead on. I'm not the most social person because I was bullied heavily as a kid, I was borderline agorophobic and palpably fearful of people, but being active/exercising/athletic saved me in the long run from being a shut-in. Strangely once I had a kid I truly ceased caring what people thought about me and now I can talk to strangers much more easily, and things have flipped: I now notice how antisocial and fearful/distrustful most people are. But being fearful/distrustful as a default stance makes others immediately fearful/distrustful. This is the pernicious effect of political manipulation and heightening is having on the world, I see it every day. Strange thing is I now live in a very rural area with a lot of Republicans, and they can't really get along well with each other because of the fomented mass distrust even in a lily white 60-70% Republican town. Anyway, the point is I think we need a new activism: one of simple, polite interaction with other people. I almost take pleasure in a simple polite interaction with people and service workers, with a quick conversation about how things are going or a shared laugh about something human like a fumble or some other human experience that modern society wants to pretend doesn't happen. That interaction is the basis of what "walkability" really means as a community: a forced series of face-to-face interactions that brings more trust and faith that the people around you are "good" people. You won't build that with walls of steel and houses with fences in suburbs. It is apparent that the "community" in suburbs is simply social inertia from previous generations that had real community, and a bit siphons off every year.
The more I learn about how extensive American car culture is, the more grateful I am that Canada didn't have the funds to build our road infrastructure as prolifically as they did.
I would contend they do not explain everything wrong with American cities. I was just on the Portland OR sub and that place is filled with complaints about homeless encampments, fentanyl junkies roaming the streets and the inability of their court system to process criminal charges due to a massive shortage of public defenders. I don’t think mega drive throughs explain that.
Mega drive through is a major sprout of tumour at the heart of American urban problems. A perfect symptom of well understood issues if you will. The average monthly cost of owning a car has gone beyond $1,000 in the US and for the vast majority of people it is an absolute necessity. This reduces disposable income and eats away at the ability to accumulate wealth Braindead resistance to mixed zoning helps keep the rent high. Lack of at least medium density housing as well. Remove literally crippling car dependency and make 4/5 family apartment buildings a common thing and watch homelessness plummet, among other things. It's a miracle you don't have more homeless people given the fact everyone literally needs a car (an ever depreciating asset prone to major breakdowns).
> and make 4/5 family apartment buildings a common thing Lol - literally no one wants to live in cheap high density stick-built housing if they can afford not to.
>Lol - literally no one wants to live in cheap high density stick-built housing This is absolutely untrue. >if they can afford not to Homeless people, housing crisis, housing affordability, homeless people, housing crisis, housing affordability ... I just can't shake it, these phrases keep haunting me.
And all those people who would live in them would move out for single family housing the moment they had the opportunity and resources. This kind of housing may be a temporary fix for deeper societal issues, but it will never be the foundation of a "walkable" urban panacea because living in them fucking sucks compared to single family
Part of the problem is that high-density apartment design has been centered around cost rather than quality for so long, people don't have any idea of what a GOOD urban apartment can look like. The only things a SHF can have that an apartment cannot have physically, is a YARD. Everything else, hypothetically, you can have in an apartment design. You can build thicker walls to have privacy, you can build larger spaces. You can do everything else AND still build something more efficient than a single home. There are MANY people who'd be willing to give up a yard and still have a place to call home, that isn't a huge use of space in a community.
Having done both, I've much preferred living in apartments downtown where I can easily walk to everything cool to living in a single-family in a suburb. The suburb is boring and bland and I have to drive everywhere. The city is vibrant and interesting and I can walk to a ton of different restaurants, the grocery store, my friends, etc. Ask literally any European and they'll agree.
Yeah, that's why well off people don't live in cities as we all know. It's just the poorest of the poor. Such places don't exist in the US or Canada nor have they ever existed.
bro. my commute is 3 minutes long, by bike. across one street from my building there is a strip mall with a grocery store, pharmacy, several clinics, a dentist, a barber and basically every other kind of store or service you might need in the regular course of life. across the other street there's a 24 hour convenience store and a cool little beer bar. 2 blocks in one direction from my apartment is one of our city's high streets, more shopping, more bars and theatres and the like. 17 blocks in the other is the arena and brand new entertainment district, city hall, the museum, the art gallery, *another* high street (with a farmer's market in the summer) and the downtown mall. i mentioned my bike earlier? i don't own a car. don't need one, i live in a dense neighborhood downtown with protected bike lanes. i commute nearly everywhere by bike, no matter the weather (i live in one of the coldest cities in the world, btw.) saves me like $1000/month. i don't pay for gas, i don't pay for parking, i don't pay for insurance, and for the price of one monthly car payment, i can give my bike year-round top-notch maintenance, at the bike shop no less. don't need a gym membership either. i bike like 150km a month just going places, to say nothing of the pleasure rides. i'm in my 40s and still look like i'm 25. you don't want any of that, fine. to each their own. but i *very much do*. i want it all and i won't settle for anything less. far from the only one of my kind, btw.
> i live in one of the coldest cities in the world, btw. You live in Edmonton. Talk to me about cold when you're living in Fairbanks. You would straight up die biking everywhere in Tuscon under the heat dome, at the other end of the spectrum. > you don't want any of that, fine. to each their own. but i very much do. i want it all and i won't settle for anything less. far from the only one of my kind, btw. Yes, yes, you're a fit-privileged self-centered douche and old people or disabled people can go screw themselves as far as you're concerned. God forbid someone have to go pick up a week's groceries for a family of seven or eight in an area with hills. I hope you think about your post when you have your first procedure, or autoimmune issue, or ACL tear, or heatstroke, and you actually see what everyone else is dealing with their entire lives.
Lol Edmonton routinely posts lower temps than Fairbanks and at least once a winter we are literally the coldest place in the world. I clock a least a few minus 40 commutes every year. And Tucson, AZ? The cycling capital of Arizona? That Tucson? And I'm not saying that because I'm some super hero, as the to the rest of that load of bullshit you just dropped off. I have one bad knee already in fact, and I see people worse off physically than me in the bike lanes every day. You can go 15 km/h no problem sitting upright riding a 1 speed cruiser. Cycling is easy, ebikes make it easier. But of course, none of that is relevant at all because I'm replying to a guy who said *nobody wants* my lifestyle and only live it because they can't afford it. It literally says in my post "to each their own" you dipshit. Seems like you're a little jealous, I don't blame you, but that's not my fault or my problem. Vote in local elections. Read strong towns.
There are a few US cities where your options are an apartment like that, a high rise apt, being a multimillionaire, or living the inexpensive single family home dream between a trap house and a drug den lol. And yeah, if we didn't effectively subsidize the suburbs in the US with car infrastructure, condos and apartments of that type would be an attractive option.
What if you were homeless, would you want to live in one then? I think I would.
As you live in your stick built McMansion. The irony is just dripping.
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Do you think anyone would demolish your house and force you to switch to a condo? >You don't have a clue. Cut the BS, you ain't that special.
The most American of responses. "You've suggested something different, and at no point did you imply that I have to completely upend my way of life, but I'm going to pretend you did so that I'm a victim" Fuck off.
Fully agree. A willingness and ability to enforce public order and provide sufficient accommodation for the population are also necessary to support quality of life in the cities.