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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

In a walkable city you go by a store every time you go outside - you come back from work, you pass by a store or two where you can buy fresh groceries. This has also an impact on healthy diet, giving access to fresh goods which wouldn't possibly last a month and thus wouldn't get eaten if people drive shopping every few weeks.

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> In a walkable city you go by a store every time you go outside

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 don't want to live in a walkable area boy have I got great news for you. Close your eyes and point at the map!

I would love to live in a walkable area. I would like people designing walkable areas to not make assumptions like "Oh, everyone will love shopping several times a week, just like I do!". (Or worse, "I don't enjoy this myself but I'm sure other people will!", which is a common failure mode.) Let's not have a false dichotomy that assumes everyone who wants to live somewhere walkable also enjoys running errands and wants to do it more often.

> 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.

Not really. People tend to have tolerance levels for commute type activities, so while cars enable going farther in the same amount of time, the time budget doesn't change. If they have a walkable city they are likely to find reason to go to a farther away store if it is still in the time budget.

Yes, I could, but I don't want to. Go to store, walk around, wait in line, for what.. 1eur worth of milk? Plus you buy a bunch of other stuff that you don't need, because "it's there". I just make a list, go to the store once, fill up on 100, 150eur of stuff, and I'm done for a week or two. Stores are horrible, people are slow, they 'park' their carts in the middle of the aisle, so you have to bump into them to pass, they're too stupid to use the self-checkout lines but still use them and wait for someone to help them (scan stuff for them, instead of just using a normal line), people wait for 10 minutes in line, without realizing they'll need to pack their stuff and pay, so only after half of their stuff is scanned, they remember to take out their shopping bag, and only after they hear the price, they start searching their handbag for a wallet. Then they remember they need cigaretts too,... Delivery sucks too.. overripe bananas, bumbped apples, half-thawed frozen stuff, crushed boxes, long-lasting food just before the expiration date, etc..

Nope, weekly trip to the store minimizes all of the issues.

in this case maybe amsterdam style will suit better your usecase? you take a 5-10 min electric bike(maybe even cargo type) trip to a discount store, you put everything in bags/cargo space and return home. Or Swiss style: discount stores usually are placed close to trams, you buy your stuff and just take a tram to your home(and since usually those have ded lanes, it's damn fast). You may be concerned about capacity(maybe you don't like to carry two big bags) - you can take a foldable luggage cart. Ofc you can also order a taxi and since you live not too far, price isn't that big if you do this once a week. You can also use your car, but with all added costs/time spent for some ppl it's not worth it. There are also services that just bring to you what you order from these big stores. There's one more thing: you could combine the two store types: daily shopping for some small stuff in nearby store could offset the need to go to a bigger store by one week

IMO modifying life style for chronic car owners is nonstarter. Simple / fair incentivize is to make it justifiably expensive. Reduce street parking / op lots. If stores want car customers, they need to build parking infra onsite, either above or below grade. Expensive car elevators if they have to. Charge premium for parking costs. If they try to pass on cost to all customers instead of just drivers, then their prices will be less competitive with stores without onsite parking. Car owners have right to car, but they should pay for all of externalities, and if that works out to be expensive parking bill everytime they bulk shop then so be it.

There is no 'street parking' next to shopping centers/malls, it's all organized parking lots (usually underground, below the shopping center). What kind of a shopping center requires you to park on the street?

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?

Why would I want to drive somewhere just to shop? I don't care about rain. If it is absolutely pouring I don't need to to out. I don't feel the need to live entirely disconnected from nature.

But why? I have a car, I just drive to a shopping center with enough parking and do my business there. Why would i go out of my way to use a bike, in rain and cold or heat and sun to go to a shopping center without parking? The malls know this, that's why they have parking, usually underground.

If malls know this, parking reqs should be eliminated so that every business decides for itself how much parking they need

Why? It's because you're making other people pay a large part of the cost for your convenience. We aren't going to tolerate it forever.

And those stores will be significantly more expensive to buy from while having a smaller selection of goods. It's my understanding that small stores also live off of selling less healthy stuff like alcohol, fast food etc. Some villages here lost their only store after an alcohol tax increase because the stores weren't profitable to run anymore.

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