I think most people would call that “the middle of nowhere” or out in the boonies... or it could be a new area that is growing.. 15 miles from groceries is too far to be called a suburb
It does sound appaling but, here in the UK, my dad lives in a fairly large city and, once a week, I drive him to the largest supermarket in the area which is about 10 miles away.
There are, of course, other supermarkets much closer (2 within walking distance) but they are not quite so big, have a limited choice and are situated in areas which attract a certain class of clientel (known in the UK as Chavs). For him, the inconvenience is worth it - although it does take 3 hours out of my day.
So your dad will only shop at Sainsburys despite having an Asda on the doorstep?
I don't get going to a supermarket at all. We've had groceries delivered once or twice a week from Sainsburys, Ocada, Tesco, Asda, etc for about 10 years.
The concept of walking around a supermarket on a regular basis fills me with dread - all that wasted time and effort.
Apparently you can't just put a generic "grocery" as the destination, but if you search for "grocery" and check different results, you'll get 10-15mn for all of them.
That's pretty standard US suburban sprawl, usually under the insanity that is euclidean zoning: entire neighbourhoods zoned exclusively for detached single-family homes, not allowing any business (no bakery, grocery store, florist, no nothing) and no multi-family dwellings.
Better transportation also creates trips that would otherwise not exist at all. For example, people go grocery shopping more often and buy less on each trip. Or they decide to go to the office one more time each week instead of working from home.
When I lived in a tiny Cambridge commuter village 30-minute cycle out from where I worked, the local grocery store was closer to me than one corner of Milton Tesco car park is from its opposite.
Here in Berlin? First place I stayed, out in the suburbs, the basics were a bit further — 300m for a bakery — but there were also seven supermarkets within 1 km.
The solution is to make suburbs more dense so that people are closer to the places they want to go. I suppose this would ultimately result in a “town” rather than a suburb, though.
> In a suburb, the solution isn't anything except building more and better roads.
That's not a solution. Suburbs are self-bankrupting by definition: they're so sparse the taxes can't cover the infrastructure cost.
The solution is to relax zoning and make the suburb denser and liveable.
Removing and narrowing roads is a good way to do that: it increases space available for non-car infrastructures and produces free surface for "neighbourhood businesses". It also naturally routes through traffic around the area, rather than having to force that through inconvenient culs-de-sacs and making the suburb into a maze which requires driving 10 minutes to go to the neighbor's house.
In a suburb, the solution isn't anything except building more and better roads.
People aren't bicycling 10-15 miles to the grocery.
They should be, but, that's a different societal problem.
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