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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> he costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.

A high school I understand (where I live in the UK it's common for high school kids to catch the bus to school if they don't live close - as long as you live within a 15 minute walk of the bus stop that seems fine). But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.

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> But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.

I feel that the American view of a grocery store is one of those mega-Walmartesque stores with infinite aisles of stuff, rather than the more common small-scale grocery stores we are used to here in Europe.

At least on my trips to the US I don't recall seeing many small-scale grocers in neighbourhoods, it was either stores like CVS or going to a mega-grocer.

In the US you don't really have the urban Tescos and Sainsbury's and so forth. You have some equivalent local markets but it's mostly fairly spread out supermarkets or 7-11/CVS/etc. which really don't count as grocery stores.

Many urban areas in the US all have lots of local, smaller, specialty, and neighborhood grocery stores. It's not a novelty for those who live in those areas. And they're not 7-11s.

Those large stores are where most people buy food. The margins for food in them are very low, but they make it up by volume. Smaller stores cannot compete on price or selection, and so even if there is a small store close Americans will make regular trips to the large store that has everything at a low price for most food. There isn't much room for the small stores anymore.

There are pros and cons to the above. Do not claim what you are used to is better: it is different, not better or worse. Odds are you have not spent enough time using both to make a real claim. even if you have, odds are your stage of life is different enough that you cannot compare.

> Just convert a house.

In many places there is a miserable quantity of political and legal infrastructure to prevent that from happening. Undoing that is a necessary part of 15-minute cities, but it may be weirdly unpopular.

(also, people expect a wider range of things than will fit in an old style corner shop, and you need to have HGV parking..)

Not weird at all. People don't like change. There's a reason NIMBY attitudes are nearly universal.

I don't agree that it's how it should be, but even in an already urban area (Somerville) getting things built is like pulling teeth. There's a literal hole in the ground from a fire a decade ago that people have been fighting development on for years, because they argue it will bring more people to the area and make it harder to street park. As if there's a guaranteed right to have public space dedicated to your private vehicle.

In the densest parts of European cities, the delivery lorry stops outside the supermarket just before or just after the shop opens and they unload quickly. Often, that pretty pedestrian street full of shops has road access to the rear, but not always.

Parking regulations are written to accommodate this. The pedestrian streets in the centre of Copenhagen allow deliveries from 4am to 11am, but I think there may be additional restrictions on large trucks as they seem to be out before 8am. Rubbish collection is also at these times.

Yeah, I would add: for a small shop the delivery van doesn't necessarily need to be that big either. I know a lot of shops that get supplied primarily by vans that are not much bigger than a transit van.

> But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.

The difficultly is making the typical residential dwelling compliant comply with existing regulations like the Americans with Disabilities act and complying with things like commercial insurance policy requirements.

Yup, kids busing to school is very common in the US too. I agree about a bus stop.

Heck even suburban schools around me are trying to stop everyone from dropping off their kid with their car in person. It's just a hassle / traffic.

That’s the inevitable consequence of the local decisions that have made it dangerous or impossible to walk to school. Many school districts then see an opportunity to save money by charging families to ride the bus.

Ergo, massive traffic jams of parents individually driving kids to school.

The suburban schools I’m thinking of are perfectly walkable.

There’s also ample bussing.

The parents just want to pick their kids up.

Bussing in the USA was a civil rights innovation to integrate schools. At the time neighborhoods were still racially segregated, so neighborhood schools were overwhelmingly the race of whatever the local neighborhood was. The only way to have integrated schools was to send many kids to a school in a different neighborhood, hence bussing.

That’s distinct from just having school buses. Most school bus service does not exist to desegregate school districts.

You are correct. But Seattle's history with desegregation bussing had a major impact on the nature of the schools in Seattle today. It was very common for students to spend a total of 90 minutes each day being bussed across town rather than walking 15 minutes to their closest school. It gave birth to a thriving ecosystem of private schools that still dominates the social fabric of the city today. Over 25% of all students in Seattle are in private schools, with that figure being much higher in the wealthier North Seattle neighborhoods.

The logical followup would be to subsequently charge parents to use the pickup areas and lower/subsidize the bussing costs.

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