The vast majority of folks don't want to walk/bike in Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans, etc where it's near or over 100 degrees in the summer.
I live blocks from Costco in one of those cities but the option is either get on my bike and share the four-lane road with aggressive drivers in massive trucks/SUVs or use a tiny sidewalk that randomly stops and picks up again a block or two later.
In other words, if you want to bike to get your groceries, Costco is the wrong choice.
The lack of infrastructure is what makes the routine unpleasant, not failing to carry a small bag of bagels home. Not even the weather since riding a bike casually creates a breeze.
A place like Costco can only exist with the support of a large amount of car infrastructure. So if you want to go there that's what you have to deal with.
Swap Costco out with any place I might want to go, and my point doesn't change because whether I can carry a bag of six bagels or eat a pizza in their food court isn't up for debate.
You got one-shot by a triviality. The argument is not whether Costco should be the one building built in more density acoss our cities but whether our cities are hospitable to walking/biking.
Costco just happens to be an example of a business I used to like to bike to near me, but it's adjacent to many other businesses I could have mentioned instead like restaurants, a cafe, and my friend's apartment, not the sole reason the streets exist around it.
In my experience, people who live this way don’t have a problem with any of it.
You can’t just “undo” one piece of this without undoing everything else about our society. And that’s just not likely to happen in a democracy, as annoying as that may be.
Replace Costco with "some place I like to go" if that is less distracting.
The entire nature of commerce in much of the US is based around the automobile. You are expected to buy things in quantities that are best transported by a car. You are going to a place that is stocked by the truckload because it is placed near a road or highway.
The money is made because of the road network. That's why governments build highways and roads: to enable commerce that they then tax. It's more efficient for a lot of commercial purposes if you have commerce occur at the scale of a vehicle than it is if it occurs at the scale of a person.
If you want to go to a park or some other place "I like to go", sure, it's great to have those within walking distance, but that's not going to be enough to motivate political and economic will to scrap trillions of dollars in investment in infrastructure based on the automobile. It just isn't.
This just isn't true. You got distracted by my mention of Costco and then ran with it.
Do you know how people live in walkable cities without a car? Not unlike people who live a block from H-E-B, except passing by the shop is part of your day. You can pick up of quart of milk and some eggs and avocados for breakfast because it's no big deal to walk to the store and carry a bag.
> It's more efficient for a lot of commercial purposes if you have commerce occur at the scale of a vehicle than it is if it occurs at the scale of a person.
That's not what the data shows. We subsidize car infrastructure, and less density is worse for commerce, and land that could have been used for more business is eaten alive by surface parking.