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When planners map a city's grocery access, they often draw circles a half-mile wide around each supermarket and shade everything outside them as 'underserved.' The method is tidy, but it assumes that a straight-line half-mile means the same thing everywhere. In a neighborhood of quiet, gridded streets, half a mile is a ten-minute walk. In a district split by a six-lane highway with a single pedestrian bridge, the same half-mile on the map may require a forty-minute detour on foot. Residents there are counted as 'served' by a store they cannot practically reach. A recent survey asked shoppers not how far their nearest store was on a map, but how long it actually took them to get there and back carrying bags. The answers scrambled the official picture: several blocks the city had marked green reported the longest real travel times in the survey, while a few shaded blocks turned out to sit beside an unmapped corner market. The planners' circles, it seemed, measured distance faithfully and access poorly.

The passage most strongly suggests that the planners' mapping method is flawed primarily because it fails to account for what?

  1. The prices that different supermarkets charge for the same goods.
  2. The number of residents living within each half-mile circle.
  3. Physical barriers that lengthen the real travel time to a store.
  4. Whether residents own cars or must rely on public transit.

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