WE ONCE HAD STREETCARS LOOK WHAT THEY TOOK FROM US
The Ford Motor Company decided that streetcars weren’t a proper mean of transportation, both for the US people and for the Ford Motor Company shareholders.
Still my favourite form of transport
the virgin bus route weeps and gnashes at the feet of CHAD STREETCAR
You walk to the fucking grocery store. I know it sounds wild but we have legs so we can use it.
That doesn’t work if the grocery store is too far to walk or for larger grocery hauls (which often go hand in hand - the further away, the fewer trips you’ll want to make). I’ve been told that some places just genuinely don’t have a grocer within 20min walking distance, because some construction planning apparently prefers huge zones of housing without any kind of commercial usage allowed - no baker, no grocer, no hairstylist, no doctor - making it effectively impossible to have any of those amenities in range.
Obviously, that is a planning issue and ought to be fixed. You’ll have to contend with NIMBYs, but you’d have to do that with any changes anyway. Alternatively or additionally, you could install a usable network of bus lines and trams (though they shouldn’t be run for profit, so it’ll be a tough sell too).
There is also the issue of accessibility, but I think that would be trivial to solve as a side effect: If the streets are less crowded with cars, it’s easier to offer special accommodation for people with limited mobility or anxiety issues.
Bikes are faster than walking and you can attach a trailer. I know a lot of people do that in denmark. Suddenly your cargo capacity is larger than a lot of cars, of course not for weight. As for people with mobility issues, where i live they have a dedicated branch of the public transit for them. On train you can go with wheelchair and if you need extra help in the city they can send you someone with minibuss to help you. Same if youre not in a wheelchair but limited because of your age. Of course these arent cheap to solve but putting out the la fires that were caused by global warming that was in part caused by cars isnt cheap either.
Bikes are faster than walking
…but put me at a higher risk of hurting myself because I’m bloody clumsy (impaired balance and coordination). Joke aside, good point.
As for people with mobility issues, where i live they have a dedicated branch of the public transit for them. On train you can go with wheelchair and if you need extra help in the city they can send you someone with minibuss to help you. Same if youre not in a wheelchair but limited because of your age.
That is awesome!
Of course these arent cheap to solve
In the short term, no, it’s probably an expensive project. But in the long term, even aside from environmental impact, I think it would save money.
Just not for the car manufacturers… Those poor, poor billionaires will need to find a different income I guess.
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.
Many cities at one time had trolley service which did local point to point connection. Then they were forced out because there was more profit in growing car dependency.
I bought the red car so I could disssss…mantle it.
Capitalist government when public transport (a public service) is not making profits
Seems more like politicians were
bribedlobbied to cut funding by car makers than they were counting coins and said we’d get more (as a government) if everyone just drove from home.
There were forced out because they had to pay for the road surface but vehicles could use it for free and cause damage. They also would block the trolley because people have always been assholes.
More importantly they had contracts with the cities with set fares and the cities wouldn’t let them increase the fares so they went bankrupt. source
Fun fact: this is the premise of Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Yeah right, let me just walk to the supermarket XD
is back in 25 minutes with bag of grocceries
:o
“I don’t want to carry bags all that way!”
Here. Take a backpack.
the bicycle in question:
Shopping trolleys have grown in popularity in Sweden in recent years, sort of like a rolling suitcase but with more space, specifically made for grocery shopping.
Personally, I use a pannier basket on my bike though. Best way to shop for sure
In Austrian cities we see an increase of cargo bikes
Car drivers hate them, but in the city you’re much faster with a bike anyway
I love shopping trolleys… But avoid the ones with multiple wheels for climbing stairs, they’re loud as hell on pavement.
no im obese and entirely brainwashed that walking is detriemntal to my health or smth idfk
societal constraints hold back the minds of those who are lazy to change
:D
1: I’ve taken the metro to get groceries loads of times
2: Trams
Trams are the shit
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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!
Driving is for free people, walking is for slaves! /s
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
Oh, they’re putting up road barriers? No? Are they taking away cars? Also no? Do the new shops create so much traffic that it’s just not feasible to leave? Also no?
Then how the hell are they restricting anything?
conspiracy
Oh right. I forgot what type of people we’re dealing with.
My condolences, best wishes and hopefully justified congratulations!
The best is when the grocery stores are so close that you don’t need a car or a train. Japan does it right. You can always walk to at least one grocery store.
True enough for urban areas.
There’s also a lot of more rural areas in Japan where the only thing in walking distance from a house is a bus stop, and it might be a bit of a long walk.
I’m sure there are more remote places, but I haven’t been to those places.
I think the important part is that the Japan residents know it is possible once the town or city grows vs here in North America where people cannot fanthom the idea of not having a car (or in the US and Canada 1 car per person on the home).
I am privileged since I have been able to work from home recently, but it is so clear that you don’t need a car if non-work things were closer (better zoning and design roads for people instead of cars). Once you put 1k miles per year on your car instead of 10-20k and your quality of life is much higher due to no stress from having to commute it starts to radicalize you against into the dumb shit we do in the name of growth and profit (not violently but still makes you feel cheated out of a better life).
It’s not only Japan, I dare to say most countries have grocery stores within walkable distances.
It sure was great. We don’t have that at all in the US.
Greg is gonna shit on the floor when he’ll learn that happens everywhere in Europe.
In socialist Europe, I walk to the groceries, comrade… I take 15min train ride from home to work in the city center… and I wait no longer than 5 minutes on train because that’s its frequency… but I have no car…
Damn it must suck to live in such terrible conditions
Don’t a decent amount of European businesses even do delivery in back by train?
Probably, I mean it makes sense. The few times I’ve been in Europe, in the many cities I’ve been, the public transit was good.
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.
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.
Wow, one more thing to thank Reagan for that I was unaware of. Thank you for the link.
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?
Trains also work to get other traffic off the road too. It solves congestion for everybody, not just you. That way when you do have to drive a car, there are fewer of them on the road.
If you have to take a train to the grocery, that’s a failure in local planning and a business opportunity. That said, not every store has everything and I, too, have taken a train to the grocery store for fancier/rarer things.
In some parts of rural Japan, we also have a grocery truck carrying staples and things you requested the last time they came from the actual store. This is a huge lifeline to some rural elderly people, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be more broadly applied in other areas.
I had two grocery stores in 5 minute walking distance. I had one store with more stuff, think also basic electronics, kitchenware, home appliances etc, in one station with the inner city train that was a 5 minute walk from my flat.
For years i did my groceries taking the train and i fail to see the problem. Just having to walk to the parking lot, get my car, drive to the store i can reach by train, then park there would have taken me twice as long even without traffic.
In inner cities cars are a liability for everyone including their driver.
We just have food delivery. You order and it arrives the next day, no delivery fee. Of course the sales usually aren’t as good as in typical stores but the general prices are almost identical. They deliver in cute little electric vehicles.
That’s cool. Though less bog in terms of infrastructure.
Holy based. Very cool
If the frequency is good enough, this isn’t a problem.
The best case scenario is as you mentionned : a grocery that you can walk easily, that has everything you need.
But having a light rail with high frequency makes it so that you can reach more area easily. And it also means that less dense part of the city still be serviced decently.
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.
I take a 10-minute detour on the way home from the light rail station, fit one or two or sometimes even three days worth of groceries in my backpack, maybe make another trip of about 25 minutes + time in store (which you’d have anyway) for some more after dinner. Some extra walking doesn’t hurt my pudge, and I’d rather do more walking now than be unable to later.
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.
I’m disabled and definitely have a “year round tan”. I work, but the bulk of my recent experience is extremely specific to state and federal law/practices. My wife isn’t disabled, is lilly white, and works, but almost ALL her experience is working with US municipalities. We’re definitely not rich.
It might be doable, we’re at least taking a stab at leaving the US.
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
Yes, it’s called a tram. It’s how I get to the shops, city centre, etc.
