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Comment by jseban | Hacker News Reader

> I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier.

Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficient, I already have access to several parks for taking a walk if I want to.

Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

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I've never owned a car in my life, never got a drivers license. I live in a walkable city (Berlin, close to the border). When I need to haul things around the city I take the cargo bike.

For decades I simply carried groceries in a big backpack and walked to the markets on foot (they are all within a 10 minute radius from where I live). I'd call the layout of my neighborhood functional and efficient.

Adverse weather has never been an issue for me. It's not like I regularly have things to haul that cannot possibly be rescheduled to a time after a thunderstorm. Some drizzle is barely even an inconvenience. Having to share the road with cars is the most annoying part of being mobile in the city.

> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

I'd like to have more convenient access to drugs, but our parks don't seem to attract enough dealers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Seriously, though: when drugs and crime become a problem, making public spaces hostile to all people seems like a solution that should not be among the top ten.

Yeah and if you stopped doing that and instead used a car to buy your groceries or ordered them delivered to your doorstep, you would have more free time and more energy. People want free time and energy. Just because it "works" for you to walk in the cold rain carrying groceries in a backback, doesn't make it the best solution. If there are better solutions, why insist on doing it the worst possible way?

Walking for 10 minutes with an umbrella to the shop takes about the same effort as packing all this things into car and later unloading it and driving.

Or even less if shop is 300m away.

Oh, you misunderstand. Involving a car would most definitely not make it a better solution.

I have no interest whatsoever to involve cars in my life. Having to share the roads with them is bad enough. (The arrogance of space is ridiculous.)

Deliveries: these cost little because people aren't paid properly. If I wanted to pay them properly, I wouldn't be able to use their services much. So instead of normalizing exploitation in the name of convenience, I prefer not to use delivery services when it can be avoided. And with different supermarkets in almost every direction, within 10mins on foot they most definitely can be avoided. I don't mean to moralize, and I'll step right off this soap box, but keeping bad jobs alive is a disservice to my community.

More energy / more free time: neither the time nor the energy are wasted. If you want, you can see the time spent as an investment into health and focus, a tool for stress-reduction, an active period of mental rest, but really: this is not a zero sum game.

I don't think any of this will convince you, and I'm not trying to. But perhaps you can see that your view on the "best solution" is hardly universal and well-established alternatives exist that work for a surprisingly large number of people.

> and with different supermarkets in almost every direction, within 10mins on foot they most definitely can be avoided.

You do realize that this is just your privilege? Most of people don't have everything in the walking reach, some would have to bike up a hill for a few kilometers to get to a shop, etc?

Don't get me wrong, it's great that you can, but it's just a lucky consequence of where you live, not something that's universally applicable to everyone.

> You do realize that this is just your privilege?

This is exactly what TFA is about. It should not be a privilege, but it is, because we made it scarce. Not because it is more expensive to create, it is not.

I live in the Netherlands. Being able to walk to the supermarket in 10mins is very common. What you call privilege, we just call urban planning.

Good for you, I don't, and that's my whole point. What works for you wouldn't necessarily work for me, and not because we are savages incapable of urban planning, but because there are real challenges totally different than in Holland (geographical, economical, historical, cultural, etc.). Simply, what you call "urban planning" is way easier to do in a flat land and specific types of architecture, where cities where already built with planned street layouts, wide boulevards, etc. I happen to live in an old city with lots of narrow, one way streets, steep hill slopes, etc. and urban planning can get you only as far, without resorting to destroying historical neighborhoods just to make space for bike lanes. And btw my city is perfectly walkable, to make it clear, it's just not particularly bike friendly...

Anyway, my point being that IMHO it's not always a good idea to just try to copy/paste architectural and urbanistic solutions between regions with very different geography, culture and population density, no matter how trendy the idea is.

> You do realize that this is just your privilege?

Yes, that's the point, though. This discussion thread is about walkable cities.

I should also point out that urban planning that gives priority to people who walk benefits everyone, independent of their income. This cannot be said for designs that give priority to cars.

What bikes have to do with walkable cities? IME the explosion of popularity of e-bikes, e-scooters, etc. made my own city only less enjoyable for walking, not more. IMHO if you want a walkable city it should be organized around pedestrians and efficient means of public mass-transport (trains, trams, electric busses), not bikes... and all I hear is a push for replacing cars with e-bikes...

> Yeah and if you stopped doing that and instead used a car to buy your groceries or ordered them delivered to your doorstep, you would have more free time and more energy. People want free time and energy.

From my personal experience, I've found that doing physical exercise (paradoxically enough) seems to give me more energy. On those days where I've sat still all day I'm much more likely to feel like doing nothing after work, whereas when I've done my usual cycle commute I'm usually a lot more mentally alert. YMMV of course, but given the choice I'll personally rather do more than less physical exercise, even if it's small activities here and there like lugging some groceries.

Yeah but people should be free to use whatever form of physical exercise that they want. Should we never do any sports anymore and instead just force everyone to do inefficient transportation? That's just making life so much more poor.

Seems to me you’re the one insisting in doing something in the worst possible way.

I have a high street lined with shops on my way home where I can stop by, have a quick chat, perhaps pick up something that caught my attention as the scent of freshness overwhelmed my senses when I walked into the shop owned by a person that invites me for a drink and has visited my house socially.

The newest place near me right now was opened by an investment banker that chose to optimise for his hairline in his own words, so when I stop there to get stock up on exotic groceries, that is the best solution for me and if it’s raining, so what? I’ve got towels at home.

Same here, the supermarket is 3' away by foot and I've never even thought "oh man, I should take the car and go to the larger supermarket that's 15' away".

It's just not inconvenient at all. I wonder if the difference in opinion is from a lack of exercise? I don't mind carrying 20kg of stuff back home in bags, I'm used to it and it's good to get at least some exercise.

Haha carrying 20kg of stuff back home in bags, that's ridiculous! Yeah do that after a long day of work, and also you can forget ever having any energy left for doing any sport because now your only sport ever is carrying groceries. What a poor life

This is the way I live, you think I've never shopped after work? If I couldn't carry 20kg for 200m, I'd have more of a problem with how I live than where.

Yes but it's an incredibly strenuous and unnecessarily hard way of life, if that's what you want, fine, but society at large has as a core value to eliminate unnecessary, hard, repetitive tasks so that's not going to be a good way to structure neighborhoods.

I don't think we'll ever agree, because there seems to be a fundamental difference here. You speak as if I'm toiling in the mines all day, whereas I don't even think of it as particularly hard or annoying.

I'm also noticing the absence of any 'average American' experiences in this thread...although COVID has disrupted average a little.

> Yes but it's an incredibly strenuous and unnecessarily hard way of life

What are you, a granny? It is not strenuous or difficult at all.

I agree it's a hassle, but at least it does help provide some exercise.

It's no wonder the US has such a high obesity and diabetes rate, with a sedentary society like that.

If anyone seriously considers transporting 20kg for 200m "incredibly strenuous and unnecessarily hard way of life" then it is hard to treat them seriously.

Note that you can put it into backpack or use something like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wozek+na+zakupy&t=ffab&iar=images&... (sorry, not sure how it is called in English).

PS Unless they have serious medical issues, far worse than typical. Or they are really old or really young. But in such cases they likely should not drive anyway.

I think the most common way to call it would be "utility trolley" or "utility cart". Usually the ones you'll see in the U.S. are all metal and can fold up to make it easier to put them in car trunks or carry them on buses.

do you even lift?

20kg is quite on extreme side. Also, walking for 350m with 20kg of stuff is unlikely to be a problem unless you have massive health problems.

With something like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wozek+na+zakupy&t=ffab&iar=images&... it is even simpler - my 80 years old grandmother is using it for shopping.

> your only sport ever is carrying groceries. What a poor life

Just how much stuff you buy? Maybe you live in awful city with shops more than 500m away from your home?

Yeah, that’s a big part of it. If you have shops within walkable distance, you don’t need to carry huge amounts of groceries. You can just grab a few things to last you the next three days on your way past!

If you think this is strenuous and unreasonable for an able bodied person, then I think you need to level set with the rest of humanity. Also, just get a bike with a basket if you don't like carrying stuff. Personally I feel super stressed and mentally exhausted on the occasions I have to spend the afternoon urban driving... Give me the 20kg walk any day!

20 kg seems like a lot for walkable grocery shopping unless you're intentionally getting a bunch of bulk staples all at once.

It's not every time, but when we need water I get two sixpacks (for balance) and those are 18kg alone.

Not that there's anything wrong with tap water, but eeeh.

Tap water plus SodaStream is the life for me.

Oh wow, that's a great idea! I don't much like carbonated water, but if you do, this'll make your life amazing.

Regular brita filter is great solution for drinkable tap water.

I tried that but the jug had a weird smell. I don't know if those filters that go on the tap directly are better, I keep meaning to try them. Have you?

Filtering tap water at home has been a solved issue for generations. From ceramic water filters (CWF), ceramic candles to reverse osmosis and etc...c’mon dude.

Haha, I'm sorry my filter question offends you.

>I've never even thought "oh man, I should take the car and go to the larger supermarket that's 15' away".

This is funny and I think very cultural. I'm American and would walk 20 minutes to a large super market and carry 20kg back, up and down hills in San Francisco no less. I too enjoyed the exercise. I knew plenty of people who would shop at smaller stores, mostly people who grew up in cities, but I never really liked it. I grew up going to large super markets and find grocery shopping at them cathartic.

I think I'm the opposite, I prefer smaller shops because I find the big supermarkets extremely tiring. I think it's because of how hard your brain needs to work in them, you need to be making "do I need this?" snap decisions very quickly as you roll through the aisles.

Our neighborhood supermarkets are the size of, say, a basketball court, so they're not as tiring.

If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly (e.g. not a residential-only section of suburbia pretending to be a proper neighborhood) your schlepping shouldn't be any longer than a 15-minute walk either way, at which point instead of doing the periodic bulk shopping that cars incentivize, you just pick up a limited amount of stuff as you need it every day or every other day.

A lot of U.S. cities have gotten this fundamentally wrong by just not being dense enough to support businesses like this and/or zoning strict residential instead of allowing natural development of small stores, so you end up with neighborhoods that are nominally walkable but that are still pointless without a car because there aren't any businesses at all within a mile radius of your home.

I grew up in such a properly built out environment, and I just think it's a complete waste of time and effort to insist on such inefficient and inconvenient modes of transportation, and I hate wasting time and effort on recurring daily chores, I just want it to be as efficient as possible. You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different if you drive all the way to your doorstep, or make a pointless boring schlep for the last 15mins every day.

You can also just put every public transportation stop 15mins away from everyones house so you're forced to walk the last bit, look walkable paradise!

> inefficient and inconvenient

Just the other day I was about to start cooking but realized I was out of butter, so I walked about 5 minutes to a nearby store, got some, and walked back. It would have literally taken me more time and effort to drive to a store nearby with parking than just walking. The same holds for most household basics (paper towels, garbage bags, etc), for which I have about a dozen options within 15 minutes of my home, ranging from cramped bodega-type stores to large grocery stores.

> You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different

First, basic efficiency of scale when it comes to general impact on the environment; second, as I mention above, it would literally take me longer to do it all with a car than just walk.

Yeah but now you are optimising for the minority case at the expense of making the most common case worse.

The most common case is that I'm picking up about three days' worth of ingredients at a time, in which case I walk either five or eight minutes (depending on which shop has the better stuff for my list) and carry home one large grocery bag. Since I don't need to worry about parking or traffic, I can fit this into my schedule whenever and usually do so when I'm already on my way home from somewhere else.

The actual minority case is that I'm picking up something in bulk (replacing pantry stock, getting supplies for a party, etc), in which case I might switch to using my car, depending on how heavy or unwieldy it is for a half-mile walk.

Three days of ingredients is a lot, with your toilet paper and laundry detergent and everything, this breaks down immediately if you're only two people. So if you are a couple then both of you have to go shopping, that's twice the time you spend. Not to mention if you are a family

Three days of food ingredients for two people isn't actually a lot, assuming you already have bulk staples (flour, sugar, rice, etc) in your pantry. I'm already including all the other incidentals outside of bulk staples: add occasional toilet paper rolls, paper towels, olive oil and vinegar, minor snacks, etc, and you get the one large grocery bag on average per trip. Maybe two if you're eating things that are bulky to carry (e.g. kale or something with a ton of eggs).

Like, come on. No typical two-person household is going through a full package of toilet paper and an entire mid-sized bottle of laundry detergent every three days.

So you mean it works if you assume that all the heavy stuff you "already have" somehow. Ok, not exactly convinced..

Dude, you have 15 comments in this thread arguing against other people's preferred way of grocery shopping. Let it go.

> somehow

"Somehow" being "carrying a 10 pound bag of rice home over my shoulder when I eventually run out". There's no special mystery to it.

the most common case surely is groceries?

Hmm, I find it very hard to relate to this perspective.

Perhaps this is a cultural difference: I don't value efficiency in my life nearly as much as you seem to do. I don't go out of my way to waste time, but I'm perfectly happy to walk through the quiet roads while carrying groceries, thinking about what I've recently read, wondering about things I happen to see on my walk ---such as the Jugendstil reliefs on facades, a very inefficient type of decoration---, trying to identify trees and shrubs, etc.

I also really don't mind taking the time to write this comment, even though there's nothing efficient about communicating like this.

My work and art likewise are not efficient --- elegant perhaps, pretty even; but no artifact I leave behind is primarily efficient (unless it's code that was meant to be efficient only, the worst kind of code).

I used so many words to inefficiently say: I feel that efficiency is rather overrated. I won't ever give up being slow and being at ease with living slowly --- with plenty of opportunity for life to happen by accident.

PS: most of the public transportation stops are 10 mins away from where I live. Even the train. It's 10 mins away by bus ;)

Yeah, but my point is that the things everyone must do should be made as efficient as possible, so that everyone is free to choose how they want to waste their time. We shouldn't force anyone to spend their time and effort in a specific way by deliberately making something less efficient that's just stupid.

Good, then please don't build cities that force me to use a car if I want to live efficiently.

For me, it’s not about carrying the groceries, but the mental and temporal overhead of thinking about what I needed, making a list, walking however many additional minutes, spending 15 minutes shopping/paying/packing, etc would strike me as a terrific waste if done daily.

I used to do that when I interned in Germany. The market was near the bus stop and our dorm had limited fridge space, so I’d tend to buy and eat the same day (and rarely cook from scratch). That wouldn’t work so well to feed a family of four that way.

With a folding rolling cart or a bike with good panniers one could easily do all of that for the family of four with minimum hassle with one or two shopping trips a week, plus irregular trips to stock up on bulk stuff like toilet paper.

I think part of the disconnect here, though, is that you're associating this process with extra mental overhead, but when there's no extra effort needed to just get stuff you don't need to think about it as much. Forget to get butter? Oh well, you can literally just get it the next day on your way back from the park or the movie theater—or if you really need it right now, you can get it at corner store just a few blocks away at a slightly higher price.

In my house in the Netherlands, we feed a family of four each day and buy food an hour or two before we cook it precisely because we can't handle the mental overhead of planning food more than 24 hours in advance. ;-)

We don't really make lists.

That's a good point, we walk to the supermarket (or the farmer's market) multiple times a week, get one or two bags and go home. That way we don't have to have a huge space/fridge/kitchen to store everything in, either.

If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly you have (or ought to have) doorstep grocery delivery costing $1-$5.

In the UK at least, there are at least 5 competitive services offering that in every city, including most major supermarket chains, so there is no need to shlep, ever. I only go to the supermarket for fresh bread/milk occasionally in between deliveries.

I live in the Netherlands. We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing.

Much Urban planning was involved in making it better for cycling though, and it wasn’t always great for it. Off-road cycle paths being a mainstay for the country with separate lights is the biggest differentiator, and took a lot work to get there, but now you can safely cycle the entire country!

Even Cambridge in England where I used to live (and is famous for thousands of cycling students and locals) Is laughably bad compared.

Northern Ireland where my family live has also transformed large parts with Greenways projects and it has been transformational, I ran along them, walked along them to shops and cycled a long way and it was amazing I thought.

https://nigreenways.com/

> We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing.

Yeah which means that you spend a lot more time and energy on grocery shopping. That is for me directly inverse to quality of life. The more time I spend in traffic (cycling is also sitting in traffic) and queueing in crowded grocery stores, the lower my quality of life is. Who are you to decide that cycling and grocery shopping is automatically the best quality of life for everyone? Some people prefer to play tennis, or paint, or read books or whatever. No freedom, only inefficient transportation.

> The more time I spend in traffic

Where I live, walking to a small grocery store is literally faster than driving plus the ancillary annoyances of driving (finding parking, loading and unloading, etc).

To come out ahead in the time side of the equation while driving I would need to make significantly larger shopping trips spaced further apart... which would each then eat up significantly more time in loading, unloading, carrying, and putting food away.

> and queueing in crowded grocery stores

Walkable neighborhood grocery stores have smaller queues than big-box stores, as a mostly-even distribution of customers across multiple stores and floors on staffing (e.g. you can't have less than one register) mean an average of more staff per customer.

It takes me less time to bike to the shop from my home then it takes to find a parking spot in the underground parking garage and walk from the parking spot to the shop.

Same for walking to a smaller shop if I am not feeling like biking that day (so most likely taking metro to work that day). Though the chances of finding a place to park that is closer to that shop than my home is almost 0.

It is not automatically inefficient. In Zurich, I have around 5 supermarkets near by, walkable in about 5-10 minutes. Don't even need a bike. Taking the car would increase my travel time, not decrease it.

So my walkable city is more time efficient and has health benefits for using your own body instead of a machine to do the traveling. It's better if we measure for time efficiency and health. And it shows. Looking around, 95% of the people here, at least those not in cars, are healthy, slim and fit. All as it should be. What else would you optimize for?

No because you only have to take the car once a week, and you have to walk 3 times per week. If you want to force physical exercise by inefficiency like that, what exactly are the machines that should be forbidden and which should be allowed? You can do a million things from scratch which gives you physical exercise, we all rely on using machines that saves us from this poor life, why put the walking/cycling on a pedestal?

Just no. It is more efficient for me. Really don't care that you don't want to accept that. So take your efficiency argument and scrap it. You want cars and want everything to be optimized for it. That is your actual point and we both know it.

No, I want as much free time and energy as possible, and don't want to waste my life carrying water in buckets when I can have a tap. Likewise I also don't want to waste any time carrying milk either

Waling is free, you need the exercise anyway so time spent walking isn't wasted. Driving however is a waste of time.

I live really remote, as in driving 25 minutes up a mountain on a one way street remote. I still don't have a driving license. I can get everywhere by public transport, I have no stress.

Also I am talking about me, I guess most people still do their daily grocery runs.

However I buy 90% of our food online. 9% in nearby farmer shops. The relatively high population density makes next day delivery a normal thing even in the most remote places. There is literally no reason to waste time for grocery shopping these days.

How you think about exercise and time may influence whether driving increases your quality of life. To me, time spent driving is a pure waste with no redeeming value and I make every effort to minimize it. Whereas time spent engaged in physical activity (up to about an hour a day) isn't wasted at all since it improves my mood and energy levels. If that physical activity happens to save me a car trip then it's doubly useful.

For example, this morning I drove a kid to school because we were running behind and it was a ~10m round trip. Usually we bike and it's a ~20m round trip. I saved 10m of clock time but lost ~20m of exercise. Now I can choose whether to make up that exercise later and end up net ~10m poorer or skip today's exercise and end up slightly fatter and lazier.

(I agree about grocery shopping though.)

The quality of like is a personal reflection, but cycling is not inefficient, for door to door short trips bike is literally faster than public transport (which is also specifically pretty good in Amsterdam) and driving.

The layout out cities to accommodate lots of cars and easy parking is a huge cause of inefficiency often.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but I would go as far as to say most people don’t accurately imagine how it would be, when they haven’t lived somewhere like Amsterdam.

> ... schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying.

You seem to be either contradicting your position, or not accepting other people's comments in good faith.

Here you are arguing against carrying groceries every day, whereas I expect most people would - even in the proximity of markets and grocery stores - do perhaps 2 or 3 trips a week.

In a comment below you fixed upon someone's en passant claim that they're happy to carry 20kg groceries a short distance (a few hundred metres).

Of course, no one is doing 20kg of grocery shopping every day, and there's clearly a happy medium in there between mass/volume and frequency. Obviously the grocery shopping by foot continues to work well for an awful lot of people through Europe and elsewhere, and seems to be well correlated with a higher (perceived) QoL - so I don't understand how you can argue against these realities?

How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking. And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless. It's just a middle class virtue signalling competition oh look who can be the most neo-amish and eschew modern conveniences.

I churn my own butter, because that's better for the environment! Everyone should make their own butter, it only takes 4 hours, that's "nothing" Ban butter factories!

> How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking.

If you're really going to have trouble carrying 20 kg on your back for a couple of city blocks, you can use a folding rolling cart instead to do the same at the same speed and with negligible effort.

> And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless.

One truck carrying twenty tons of groceries is not the same as one car carrying a few cases of bottled water.

Half a bag of concrete? A cart is definitely the way to go. 51 lbs (23 kg) under ideal conditions is where National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health says manual laborers should take precautions against back injuries. Being able to deadlift it doesn’t make schlepping it all the way home a good plan.

> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries? At least in Poland it is not a real problem at all. Some parks are locked for night and that is all.

If making nice park is instantly resulting in crime/drugs/etc then something went really wrong.

> Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries?

Like Seattle and San Francisco? This isn't a third world problem, unless you consider these cities to be third world.

OK, I was unaware that USA really had such runaway crime problems. I thought that it is an exaggeration. (and still suspect this)

Almost every single park in downtown Seattle and San Francisco is covered in drug users. It's been this way for about ten years now.

> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

That's just a problem of having crime and drugs, not of having inviting public spaces.

Having a grocery store five minutes away is wonderful, and a pram helps with the schlepping.

As far as crime - that doesn't seem to be a big problem in places popular and busy with residents. Personally I'm more worried about a driver (the leading killer of children) hurting my child than someone selling weed.

Walking with groceries in the rain won't kill you, I promise. It's a small inconvenience but in my opinion you get a lot back for it, everything just becomes more village like and friendly. Being in a car does not tend to make people more friendly.

And just because there are nice places to hang out does not automatically mean there will be drugs and crime. That is not my experience at least.

Yeah but why do you want to turn back time to a village and make things less efficient, what's the point of pretending to be poor. Americans are the friendliest people in the world and they drive the most, the more people cycle and walk in the cold rain, the more depressed and unfriendly they become

This may be a controversial opinion, but not everything is about efficiency, especially when it comes to social interactions. But even if your life's aim is to impose rigorous efficiency on every aspect of your life, I doubt you'll be more time efficient if you do your groceries by car compared to living in walking distance of a supermarket.

Society is about efficiency. Social interactions are voluntarily and can be organised around any random activity such as games, sports, hobbies etc. It's really inflexible and incredibly limiting to force inefficiency of transport, because that increases social interactions.

People had the same argument when banks went online, all the retired people want to still go and pay their bills at the bank, because they get to go outside, meet people etc.

I can tell that we're very different people. Society to me is not about efficiency at all. I like a bit of randomness to my life and not live an absolutely regimented and organised existence. But I guess that's not for everyone.

I also like a bit of randomness and don't live an absolutely regimented existence, my point is just that people should be free to choose this randomness in their own space and time, and we should not force a particular way of randomness on everyone, and we also should not put it in the way of getting our work done.

I am in no way an activist of any kind, but especially when the weather is bad (think about rain) going around with the car is a nightmare where I live, that's why I prefer to buy my groceries everyday walking to a local supermarket.

It takes a few minutes, it's a break from work, walking in the fresh air clears my mind and I avoid the traffic jams or having to park where there is no parking space available.

Making places inviting does the opposite for crime if you do it right. You get what’s called ‘natural surveillance’ that is, where there tends to be enough people around, seeing what’s going on that it discourages crime.

This is talking serious crime - obviously things like pickpocketing can still happen.

I live in a walkable urban location and have never drove, in order to shop without having to worry about carrying heavy milk etc

I just use a trolley capable of going up steps it cost me £35 and allows me to carry a lot more comfortably

Before that I used deliveries a lot, I notice people with cars don't think very hard about alternatives like they can't even imagine a world without their car

Which means there's parts of the city that are just inaccessible to the rest of us and permanently degrades the experience of walking in most other places

> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

This not problem for inviting spaces per se. But spaces where you can hide. If you have this in ordinary "inviting" public spaces the that is sign of dysfunctional society. Most parks and town squares in cities I have lived are safe (at least if you are man).

I live in such a walkable neighborhood and for groceries I use a rather big backpack and I can get groceries for multiple days that way. For the my two-person household it is possible to get enough groceries by going to the supermarket twice a week, so either of us only needs to go once a week. Actually, I do not walk the 1 km to the supermarket but go by bike stead.

> but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying

Even with quite large family walking for 10 minutes with groceries seems to be not problematic.

Unless you live on South Pole or something.

You can get delivered in most cities now.

Yeah this is what I do, and I think it's great! But it relies on there being a driveable street outside of the house, and not a stupid walk path.

Road/driveway next to a residential buildings is standard and not contradictory to having a walkable access.

Delivery people can and do walk the last stretch, the same as they do when delivering to apartments and townhouses that don't have streets or parking directly adjacent to individual units.

>Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying.

Depends on your lifestyle but I'm quite comfortably car-free. Shelf-stable stuff like tins, rice, beans I get delivered once every few weeks. Meat, veg, eggs and milk I want fresh so I rarely buy more than a couple of days in advance. If it's less than ten minutes walk to the supermarket, or on the walk home from the train station.

>Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

Crime and drugs happen where there aren't lots of people to witness them. If you're walking at night and can choose between a busy street and a quiet one, which do you choose?

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