Arthur Peabody

Improving Public Health by Making Cities Friendly to Walking and Biking | Sports Medicine | JAMA Internal Medicine | The JAMA Network

genec

OMG, they're gonna make America look like Europe!

Daniel4

A lot of Americans should look more like Europeans. (Not us cyclists, of course.)

genec

I for one am looking forward to the break up of the local giant grocery store into various shops... Butcher, Cheeser, Wine Cave, Baker, Fish Monger, Farmer, and of course Starbucks. They should all be located a few 10s of yards apart, and require me to walk between them for my daily supplies... and I should be happy to carry a long skinny loaf of bread home.

jon c. 

That would be nice, but I don't see it happening.

B. Carfree

My tiny city has numerous small shops that sell only a few types of items, many of them clustered near my home. It's actually the primary reason I settled in here seventeen years ago. When I want fish, I go to the fish store (one in my neighborhood and one in the next one down). When I want bread or pastry, I go to one of several local bakeries. On the rare occasion that I want wine, I'll either ride out to a local winery or go to a wine shop (three in my neighborhood; I guess other folks imbibe more than I do). If I want beer/ale/porter/stout, I go to one of the three breweries in my neighborhood. Of course coffee, or just beans, comes from one of the two coffee roasters in my neighborhood. Tofu comes straight from the manufacturer, who opens for sales two days per week. My meat-eating neighbors buy their meat at the butcher shop two neighborhoods down. Of course we also have stores with wider selections of products, but those large grocery-type stores are not to be found nearby.

I guess it's no wonder that when we did a survey of the neighborhood a eight years ago, we found that only 45% of the residents used a car as their primary means of transportation, about equal to the number of folks using bikes or buses combined.

The only problem is our local baguettes aren't worth the effort, so no one actually rides or walks around with one in their basket/bag.