> I live in a suburb and I walk to one of three nearby (< 10 min walk) grocery stores.
That is an outlier, though. Not only are suburbs less dense and, obviously, services are not as close, but county and/or city regulations across the US are notoriously anti mixed use developments, which make things even worse.
The National walkability index guide [0] gives suburbs a "below average" walkability score.
Informally, there's also a website called Walkscore [1], where users rate walkability in many cities and towns across the US. Even most cities rank lower than 60 out of 100, and suburbs, given the almost nation-wide aversion to mixed use buildings, do not rank higher.
Coming from Europe, it was a huge shock when I knew that I would have to walk 15 minutes to reach the closest grocery store. That, and the fact that in the US, sidewalks seem to disappear at random intervals for whatever reason.
Thank you, the EPA doc and interactive map is interesting and I had not seen that one before.
The blocks are a bit weird. For example zooming into my neighborhood there is a house with a score of 93 but the house next door (no more than 50ft away) has a score of 70 just because it falls in a different map block. Although in reality people from both houses can walk to the same things with same ease.
Found an even more extreme case in Mountain View. Houses on one side of Shoreline Blvd have a score of 90 and houses on the other side a score of 10! Shoreline has pedestrian crossings, so houses on each side should logically have the same score.
So while interesting at a big scale view, the data is flawed.
The walkscore site I was familiar with and I think it's quite bad, does not reflect reality.
Are we talking about the same thing when we talk about suburbs?
Here's the Oxford dictionary's definition: an outlying district of a city, especially a residential one.
There are always outliers and exceptions to the rule but modern suburbs are a pretty simple yet flawed idea. They allow residential single-family zoned lots with very few exceptions and they look like clusters of anywhere from 1 to hundreds of housing development projects connected together by roads.
Can you physically walk from your suburb to a grocery store? Absolutely! But for hundreds of millions of Americans, almost none of which would ever take on that task by choice, this looks like walking a few miles at least round trip and crossing at least a couple of highly-dangerous multi-lane roads around the stores they are heading to. This is just how things work in suburbs, everything is so spread out that cars turn out to be the only feasible transportation method. If cars are the only way to get around, roads need to be made wider and faster especially around those areas people are trying to get to--like stores.
This is all part of why there's growing concern around building practices that promote suburb-like development.
That is an outlier, though. Not only are suburbs less dense and, obviously, services are not as close, but county and/or city regulations across the US are notoriously anti mixed use developments, which make things even worse.