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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

If there are six people in this family, surely some of them can help carry the groceries.. but I digress. I think you miss r00fus's point - in a walkable city, you're not forced to haul hundreds of pounds of groceries from one centralized megalocation once a week. The design of a livable city means there are plenty of small shops interspersed in and near residential areas, making it easy to frequently visit them to pick up whatever you may need.

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I think there are some rose colored glasses in play here. Cities used to be just as you describe. We liked supermarkets better. What's different?

By "we", you really mean American suburbanites. Supermarkets are almost nonexistent in Germany, for example, and there aren't very many in Manhattan either.

I live within a 5-8 minute walk of half a dozen different grocery stores. It's great. I've lived in places where you need to drive, and I never want to go back to that.

Germany has many supermarkets. Where in Germany would you say they are "almost nonexistent"?

Manhattan has many supermarkets. Heck. Manhattan has many chains of supermarkets.

After the Second World War, most additional housing was built in suburbs, massive highways were built--largely for military reasons but they also contributed to suburban sprawl, and the white urban population deliberately fled to suburbs in order to maintain racial segregation from the increasingly urbanized black population. Supermarkets were a side effect.

Actually in my 5 person family only 2 of us can carry stuff. One (me) is designated as the procurement person, so I do the shopping. I can't go every day because I have a busy schedule (even on days I WFH).

Consequently I'm buying hundreds of dollars of stuff each time I go, and most times I have a kid pulling on my arm. How am I supposed to carry all this stuff?

Luckily I have instacart, Google express, and Amazon to fulfill all non-groand the deliveries are sent to my house.

To be fair, you do need to move around just to maintain health. If you're working from home, you need to walk down to the shops or something similar, to get anywhere near the level of activity which we're supposed to do. There's also online deliveries for buying heavy things like tins in bulk. A lot of families do live like that, although it's obviously not going to be universal.

It's not really the death of cars, that's just a good headline, it's a shift in priority in new design, and a transition in that direction over time. But obviously there will be huge variance in transport models in different cities and countries, and from the centre to the suburbs.

One of these: http://www.cartsonthego.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/im...

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