I moved from a UK city to a town on the edge of Dallas.

There was a crossroads with a strip mall. grocery store, dentist, food places etc, about 15 minutes away, but it was often too hot to walk. Anywhere beyond that was too far to walk.

Everything was so spaced out there. All the shops were surrounded by big parking lots. It was hard to even perceive that I was on a street with shops, at first, because everything was so far away from the road.

Now I live in a quiet street in suburb of LA. There’s a main street about 10 minutes away. So within 20 minutes walk I can visit restaurants, grocery stores, etc. Even a British supplies store to get real chocolate. Bus stops, library, doctors, dentist, opthalmologist, and a hospital, too.

But if I want a big department store, I’m driving 15 to 30 minutes.

The broader LA area doesn’t really have a center, just clusters of shops and malls at bigger crossroads. It seems endless. I could drive 50 miles to Newport Beach for vacation and never be outside a city.

Rural southern Georgia: 300m to the only gas station/convenience store in town. 10km to the nearest real supermarket, medical center, pharmacy, tiny library, dentist, and a couple of restaurants. 30km to the nearest big box store (Walmart). 100km to the nearest small regional airport. 120km to train station.

I live in rural Ohio and I drive about 40 miles (65 km) round trip a day just getting to and from work, and that’s pretty average for a rural area.

The nearest grocery store and back is about a 15 mile (25 km) round trip.

In the rural areas, which account for most of the land area of the US, things are far enough apart that it makes it impossible to survive without a vehicle.

My work commute is minimum 40 minutes one way by car. Probably 2.5 hours by bus, with probably 20 minutes of walking, in Texas heat and humidity.

I can count on a 20+min drive to get most places close to me in a large city. Not that everything is that far, but traffic can be slow.

Where I grew up the closest neighbor was about 2km away, nearest town was 25k, nearest town with a decent grocery store was around 40km, and the nearest “city” was damn near 100km.

My refrigerator is annoyingly far from my desk chair.

Distances in North America tend to be measured in hours of driving at highway speeds (usually 65mph/105kmh, but sometimes extra time added going through cities). Houston, Texas for example you can get from one edge of town to the other in an hour, plus up to an extra hour in traffic. The transit options in every metro area are different. The only thing is that people in suburbia are in the middle of a maze that would take 25 minutes on foot to get out of to the nearest convenience store (corner shop). A habit of going every other day for light shopping trips on the way from work is less common and often limited to retirees and non-working parents. What’s more common is doing a large cartful of shopping from every week to even once a month, and fitting it all in your monster SUV or pickup truck.

That said lifestyles can vary across the US, suburban vs rural, like New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles will each have their own characteristics with how far things are, how far they feel and, how developed transit is. Between cities, transit is rather disconnected without a car, you have minimal and inconvenient coach bus services and trains that might show up 3 times a week.

Things around me aren’t that far per se, but you have to cross a 45mph road (where people regularly drive 55-60 because it’s designed like a highway) along several sections of unconnected sidewalk if you want to get there without a car. The sidewalks are 4ft wide at most and have no separation from the car lanes so you have to walk with cars whizzing by just a couple feet from you. There’s also no shade.

For reference - it takes 5 minutes to drive to the nearest grocery store 1 mile away, but walking it’s 31 minutes with the unpleasant conditions I mentioned. So I’ve never walked there. I could bike and it would take 10 minutes, but biking along cars at 50mph doesn’t sound fun. I also live on a bike path, but it doesn’t go to the nearest grocery store so the nearest one along the bike path would take the same amount of time as if I walked to the nearest one (25 minutes). That one is 3.5 miles (11min) by car or a 1hr walk.

Depends heavily where you live. Rural places can be an hour drive to the closest grocery store. For me, I live about 5 minute drive from stores and my work. But I cannot feasibly walk to where I want to go, there is zero sidewalks in my area and cars go at least 35 mph on the slow neighborhood roads and 50 mph on the busier main roads (less than 3 minute drive to get to either one). Bus and train infrastructure is basically non-existent so not an option. My only option is risk my life on a bike on the shoulder of the main road (since theres no bike lanes) and hope the weather isn’t bad or I have to drive a car .

It kinda depends on where you live. I live in the suburbs near a few large metropolitan areas and I do have a supermarket within a 10 minute walk of me, and a bigger supermarket a 30 min walk away, but there are definitely places where you need a car to go shopping cuz theres no sidewalks or all the roads are like 45mph+ and really only designed for car transit.

I’ve got family who live in Texas and they say that there’s lots of places that are drive thru, like banks and dry cleaners and stuff.

I had a coworker at one of my previous jobs transfer to our US branch from the UK and he said that a lot of his friends were asking him if he was gonna visit Disney World, since he was moving to “just outside of New York City” (read: Pennsylvania, lmao) He said a lot of them were shocked to realize that its like an 18 hour drive from NYC to Disney World in Florida.

Another thing about that job, there was no realistic way for me to get to it by public transit. It was a half an hour drive, but about 3 hours of combined public transit + walking and needed me to take two trains and a bus.

Take a look at a population density map of the US. A lot of the places that don’t light up are agricultural. If for some reason you have never seen a real farm before and always wanted to then by all means come on by, but we call them “flyover states” for a reason. All the cool tourist destinations are in the glowy bits.

I assume you were asking for tourist reasons anyway. If you were just asking for curiosity sake, it depends where you live. I live in the rural part of Illinois and it only takes 15 - 20 minutes to get to a supermarket by car, but walking there is completely out of the question. Especially with the hills. Oh God, my feet hurt just thinking about it.

I went to College about 65 miles west of Chicago (or about 1 hour driving). One weekend some friends decided to take a road trip to Maine so one friend could confess their love to someone. They left Friday after classes ended and drove nonstop, took one hour in Maine for the friend to get shot down, and then dove back. They didn’t get back until late Sunday night. That’s about 1300 miles and with a few bathroom/food stops 24 hours each way.

I live pretty close to work, it’s about 15 miles (24 km). Grocery store is about 6 miles (9.6 km) from me. I consider anything within 2 miles (3.2 km) to be “right next door.” It’s not uncommon for me to travel over 100 miles (161 km) in a day. I consider When I want to visit my Sister it’s a 1120 mile (1802 km) journey. That happens a couple times a year. The crazy thing is that that’s less than halfway across the continental US. I have to travel from the Atlantic ocean all the way across the international date line in the Pacific to get across the US, and that doesn’t include our territories, just our states.

What I have found is a better comparison is the US and Europe. Think of the european country’s as us states and you start to get an idea of the scale. 44 countries vs 50 states, $24.22 trillion vs $28.65 trillion GDP, 10.2 million sq km vs 9.8 million sq km. They are very similar.

Here, let me show you.