People would walk more if they could get to where they were going fast. If you could walk to the store as quickly as you could drive, why would you get in the car? No traffic jams on a sidewalk.
It’s certainly true in NYC. Even if it takes a touch longer than taking the subway, lots of folks walk. If the infrastructure supports it, people will use it.
In dense cities? Yes. You don’t need a car to transport a load of groceries if there’s a grocery store on the 20 minute walk home from work. For larger trips, backpacks, rolling folding grocery carts, or even wagons do nearly everything a car can do. I used a car sharing service, as needed, for most of my adult life. Having moved to a city with shit for public transit, I miss the hell out of that.
I think the concept of not doing a months worth of grocery shopping for a family of four at a time is w what's foreign. going to the store for pasta and eggs and toast and nothing more is a waste of a grocery trip in some people's eyes. Those people love to shop at Costco and Sam's, and have a SUV's worth of groceries each time they do a trip. It's not a wrong way to live, but if that's how you live, not driving a vehicle with enough cargo space to hold a large body around means it doesn't make sense how you'd get any groceries. Doing that large a run is exhausting, so you don't do it very often, which means when you do go, you have to do a huge run which makes it suck. Smaller more frequent trips is shorter and mute frequent, which has its own, different problems.
Agreed. Even then, I used to take the subway to a regional big box wholesale club to grab stuff that made sense. If I lived nearer to a Costco, I’d take advantage of their fantastic sustainable fish program. Lot’s of good quality stuff has a totally worthwhile price point at those places. There’s a lot of room for different approaches, even in dense cities. Most people in cities don’t even have room to store that much stuff. I never did, and I didn’t miss it.