> One way, often used regarding so-called food deserts, is to drop pins on the map representing consequential retail locations, draw a circle around them, and count who is and is not within one of the circles using census data. This is fairly naive and therefore is much beloved of social scientists, who can get grad students to do it for them.<p>> Some people in society have to actually be right about what they publish, and they have developed an important novel insight into human behavior: people cannot fly.<p>Haha savage.<p>I really love this article - it's a love letter to understanding all of the minutiae that goes behind something simple.
"A curb cut is authority granted to you by the owner of the road (often the state government) to make a physical change to your property and the road to allow customers access"<p>This development model is very specific to Illinois and should not be generalized across the country. In many places the road could be owned by a local development corp, the county, a non-profit, a pension fund, the bank itself or some combination of the above. Illinois has harsh winters, a 9-5 suburb/downtown traffic pattern, average traffic and lots of land which makes the drive through an important feature and curb cuts EXTREMELY valuable.
I live in the UK and this article describes a type of bank branch that seems baffling to me.<p>I don't think I've ever seen a bank branch that had a car park, let alone a <i>drive-through window</i>.
I wonder how this idea will age. I haven't been to a bank branch in so long. Hell, I've written 5 checks in the last 2 years. I deposit the rare check with my phone or ATM. Why would I want to go to a branch? I took out my last mortgage with my credit union and still never when in the branch. My 20-something daughter never considered branch locations at all when picking her new bank.
> Banks can substantiate, with voluminous data, that banking relationships are very sticky.<p>Indeed. I'd have changed my main bank years ago if not for the pain of changing over all my automated payments. I don't like them at all but they've not done anything bad enough to make it worth several hours of irritation, probably spread over multiple months, moving everything.
The last article was off in interesting way (see the community bank commenter), this is more off.<p>I suppose they are written as if broadly true and without caveats, but in practice are drawn from relatively specific types of experiences that are not reflective of the whole.<p>In this article, I’d say most aren’t sited like this. Might appear like this, but this was not the algo. In the prior article, it’s possible a large set of small or regionals thought like that, but most megas do not, albeit with various ways of differing.<p>Good reads though, always well written and enjoyable. Just keep a YMMV in mind.
There’s a saying that transportation is land use and land use is transportation. This article has a great example talking about how a bank wants to occupy a large amount of space on a busy corner mostly with parking that is mostly empty, and take away large portions of the sidewalks for curb cuts so cars can make high-speed turns across the sidewalk. It’s a feature for the bank that what a town would like to be a lively location is either empty or just storing cars, and it’s a regrettable but necessary consequence to the bank that the curb cuts are dangerous or deadly to people walking along the street, thus discouraging people from walking.<p>Add up many such decisions and you get the current car dependence of the United States.
Im very confused by this article, written in 2022. The only activity I have seen with bank branches in recent years is to shut them down.<p>The ones still opened are hollow shells, with more security personally then tellers. It saddens me, because I liked banks. Thier gross now though.