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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Shopping is hard without a car. You can only buy a few items at a time. This works great if you have local bodegas all over the place, but not so much if you depend on supermarkets.

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I've stayed for extensive periods in Montreal and this wasn't an issue for me and what I assume are the more permanent residents of the city. The transit system was excellent and accommodated people carrying groceries quite easily. In cases when I had to lug something heavy, I would just grab a taxi. I've never needed a car in that city yet and the one time I did show up with a rental car for a short visit, trying to deal with parking the darn thing was a flaming headache that almost ruined the trip (Old Port fortunately had good, albeit expensive, parking.)

You'd be surprised at how much fits in a good backpack or set of panniers. A bike trailer is also an option if you really need a lot, and as a side benefit you can carry your kids in it when you're not grocery shopping. Delivery is another reasonable option that probably causes less pollution and traffic than everybody driving their own car to the store.

You'd be surprised at how often your bike is gone when you walk out of the grocery store. If city governments want to encourage cycling then they'll have to take bike theft as seriously as auto theft and stop coddling thieves.

Your bike is not getting clipped at vons in broad daylight while you are inside for 30 mins and my vons borders many a bike chop businesses operating out of tents on the sidewalk. Overnight? Absolutely.

Sure, this is largely true (panniers and trailers not withstanding), but most car trips aren't to the store. I suspect the majority are to/from work/school.

If we enabled more people to bike for our commutes and just use a driverless car (or a taxi/Lyft) for shopping, car ownership would be much less essential, and car rush hour would be a thing of the past.

I just hope they put a bike rack on the Cruise cars. :-)

I use one of those huge blue ikea bags and I can haul a weeks worth of groceries home from Vons while riding my skateboard. Plenty of others just use their own fold up grocery carts, which is probably a lot better than the circus act I'm attempting.

I shop with a backpack with can contain plenty.

yeah it's a land use problem of our own creation. Cities have banned small supermarkets in residential neighbourhoods and only allowed big box stores on the outskirts.

The end result is 'food deserts' where one has to have a car to drive out to get food.

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