[saurik]

I agree with this. I can drive to a store, buy what I want, and then drive home faster than friends of mine who live in San Francisco can even get on a bus to get to their destination. Walking around through crowded urban streets carrying valuable items you just purchased is also sub-ideal. I can buy things that are large or small, or that require refrigeration: no difference. I can make multiple stops without having to carry a ton of stuff through all my subsequent stops, as I can leave the stuff in my car.

My car is essentially a portable home I get to take with me wherever I am: it has first aid equipment, it has water and snacks, and secure storage. If you are optimizing for convenience, the correct choice is to separate things by networks of roads and use cars: that's why they exploded in popularity. You do want to live near where you work, but most of the people commuting long enough distances to make that matter are doing that due to economic issues (cost of living), not due to fundamental requirements for car deployment.

The issue is just that it isn't sustainable: it uses too much energy at too high an externality cost for us all to have this amazing level of convenience. It requires too much land to be paved and too much oil to be burned. But people should not confuse sustainability with convenience: dense urban areas that are not conducive to cars are not "convenient". To the extent to which people who live in them think they are convenient, it is because they don't understand most of the downsides they know about to cars are caused by dense urban environments.

[avn2109]

>> '...dense urban areas that are not conducive to cars are not "convenient'."

I'm carless here in the city, and my very heavy groceries from two different stores are about to be delivered by Instacart. I'm lounging around in my PJ's. If this isn't convenient I don't know what is.