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Comment by dr_faustus | Hacker News Reader

They switched many inner cities to pedastrian-only zones in Germany decades ago. What becomes more and more apparent now is that it seems to slowly but surely kill retail in inner cities. It starts with people getting their groceries at the outskirts of cities. More and more retail then is attached to those supermarkets and people only do clothes and specialty items shopping in the cities anymore which incidentally are the categories most people buy on the internet by now (its just more convenient then spending a fortune on parking and then walking for 15 minutes to get to the shop you want to get to).

In the end, while it sounds nice, in the age to the internet people are too lazy to keep a pedestrian-only inner cities viable from a retail perspective.

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In general walkable cities actually rejuvenate brick and mortar because people actually take the time out to visit, go out and eat, rather than just driving back to the store and home. So while some types of business may be negatively impacted (large stores with little customer service or any reason to actually spend time), areas generally improve if they're walkable.

Pontevedra in Spain which is a car-free city, has seen great economic recovery and population increase.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life...

Do pedastrian-only zones or the internet kill retail?

If retail still exists, just not in inner cities, then it wasn't the Internet.

Both. It’s enjoyable to go shopping once in a while. If you get treated properly and it’s easy to go there, why not? Even a small increase in price is totally acceptable. But if none of those things apply, Amazon it is. This seems to have happened with my rather small city next to the Ruhrgebiet

Pedestrian-only zones probably help specific types of retail--"tourist" (using the term broadly) type of stuff for people walking around the pedestrian area for fun. But, honestly, cities aren't great for heavy/bulky shopping anyway.

I normally go into the tourist area of my nearest major city maybe a few times a year and mostly because my company has an office nearby. But I appreciate pedestrian zones when I travel. (Last time I was in Brussels, the new pedestrian zone almost made that area of one of my least favorite European capitals almost pleasant.)

The problem with pedestrian only zones is how to haul the bounty to the place you live. There are rarely good scalable solutions.

people getting their groceries locally instead of driving in to the centre of a city is a good outcome, though perhaps not for all of the inner city supermarkets. I am deeply unconvinced this is a broader problem - e.g. Regent St or Oxford St are still global-level retail hubs even though driving there is a nightmare.

>people getting their groceries locally instead of driving in to the centre of a city is a good outcome,

No this is not. It limits competition (increases prices) raising the cost of living and reducing everyone's standard of living. When it gets so bad that the options for groceries start vanishing (because groceries are low margin) we call that a "food desert".

People shopping locally because the opportunity cost of shopping elsewhere is too high (as opposed to willingly doing it for the convenience factor) is very much not a good thing, regardless of the mode of transportation those people are using.

Does it though? Where I live there are probably three different supermarket chain stores within about 500m, so easy walking distance. If I expand that to 1km because I feel like biking a short way, there'd be dozens of more shops and probably a few more different brands. This isn't even including the multiple non-chain ones. There doesn't seem to be any risk of a food desert here.

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