I used to live in an English town that set up maximum number of parking spaces for new homes. On paper looks good, as they were trying to incentivize public transport as you mention.
However the outcome was that single family homes were virtual unaffected, as they usually have a double garage plus driveway, while people on apartment blocks had severe parking limitations. In other words, if you were well off enough to buy a house you were gold, and the less well off people had to bear most of the burden.
Also, at least over here, most shopping centers have underground parking.
The "historic city center" and all that crap... that I understand... noone goes there for weekly shopping, but instead people go there to hang out, drink coffee, eat, etc.... public transport works great for that. Malls, shopping centers or even larger stores? Nope.
When there's a lot of housing there, people sure do do their weekly shopping downtown - but it's mostly the people who live in the area. I lived in central Philadelphia for 7 years or so and when I needed groceries, I walked to one of the grocery stores in the neighborhood. I mostly wasn't carrying a ton of stuff on the train, but that's because there were shops close enough to walk to instead anyway.
(Though also, you can fit a lot of stuff in a cargo bike.)
I live in Parisian suburbs and stores are all less than 10km away, I have never had trouble getting anything.
If I need something larger / heavier (say, cinder blocks and cement) I just rent a truck for two hours and get all the heavy shopping done in the time frame.
Reality in a lot of european cities is fundamentally different to most of the US.
Milk is not supposed to last for a month.
(For clarity in case there is a nomenclature difference here, UHT milk is shelf-stable liquid milk that's entirely equivalent to any milk but lasts much longer before expiring. That's separate from things like evaporated milk or powdered milk, which are also substitutes for milk but not directly equivalent.)
I once was at a farmers place - when they were done milking the cows in the morning they brought milk in from the tank for breakfast - ever since then I can't drink store bought milk as fresh milk tastes so much better. (the milk was also unpasteurized, I believe fresh was the key to taste but I'm not sure)
But in any case, it's good that multiple options exist.
I'm all for designing for walkability, but this is a case study in failing to understand audiences. If you make this not just a possibility but a requirement of walkable cities, many people won't want to live in your "walkable" cities at all.
There are much better arguments possible here. For instance, you could promote CSAs for regularly delivered farm-fresh produce, or establish efficient grocery delivery services that use one vehicle to deliver to many many customers, or other potential options that don't involve regular car trips for grocery shopping and don't involve spending an appreciable fraction of your day shopping.
if you're concerned about how your time is spent, i think you're missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle: how much time you spend driving. you could end up saving an enormous amount of time while still going out to shop more if you cut out driving and reduce the scope of your trips.
Nope, weekly trip to the store minimizes all of the issues.
I live in a relatively small city with a pedestrian zone "historic center", and all of the larger...ish shopping centers are outside the city center, and larger stores are on the 'edge' of the city. Both the stores and restaurants in the city center are tourist-based and so are many residential properties that are now just airbnbs causing the housing crisis to be even worse. On a rainy january afternoon (so, last week for us), the city center is dead. No toursts, noone goes there to shop, since you can go futher out with a car, noone goes there to walk around, since it's raining, so it's just a few people that work there during the day and not even them in the afternoon. I mean.. why would you go to shop there, if you can drive to the edge of the city, where you can park without issues, buy stuff and drive it home?
I am not sure about which european city you are in. Here in Germany, there are more cars than people. Infact, there is so much parking shortage that, people walk 10 minutes away to park their cars, because the streets are already full.
Also, I don't know anyone going to store daily, most people shop en-mass over the weekend, mostly Saturday afternoon. Only people I see regularly on the malls near me are just retired oma/opa but they also shop like every 4-5 days.
That being said, while at least in the city I am in, has the most connected and excellent public transport, somehow I have to take a reverse de-tour by bus on my way to work, because bus routes are not often straight forward and there are only specific limited routes I can take, unless I can find a place near some U/S-bahn station(immensely difficult these days due to housing crisis).
If I had a car, I could reduce my daily commute to work by 2.5h, but then again, I don't have strict on-site requirements, so it doesn't matter.
I've long thought of the issues with public transit in the majority of US cities as being trapped at a local maximum where we're forced to implement inferior solutions because we're so far into the car infrastructure getting people to abandon their suburban homes to move to a more dense less car dependent urban structure until the underlying shape of cities would adjust to denser clusters again if they ever did.