It might help in US (I guess?) but in most of Europe this is not the issue. I've lived in several EU countries, never had a car. I always walk to the nearest grocery shop or bike to a bigger one. City design allows me to do that.
Its worth noting that in walkable cities people shop more frequently as a rule. If where you do your shopping is within a short walk of your home it becomes practical to buy stuff most days. In fact if you are traveling to and from work or anywhere else its likely you will pass by somewhere you can buy your groceries as you go about your business so there is zero additional travel time added by buying groceries every day.
If you are only concerned with what groceries you will require in the next 24 hours then carrying the required groceries for a large family isn't such a big deal.
And if grocery shopping every day sounds like an ordeal remember that everyone else is doing it too so generally everyone is only buying a handful of items. No trolleys piled high with stuff.
Andy, do you have kids while living in a walkable city? I've done this before and some days, it's like what you say. Other days its simply that we haven't gone for a bit, and so it takes 3-4 arms to heft it back. Serious pain if you're out with the tykes and don't have your spouse/SO along.
Bah, HN seems to have eaten my original response. Retyping...
>do you have kids while living in a walkable city?
I do although my collection is limited to a single 1 year old at this time.
>Other days its simply that we haven't gone for a bit, and so it takes 3-4 arms to heft it back. Serious pain if you're out with the tykes and don't have your spouse/SO along.
Shopping as a lone adult with children when you have extended your usual shopping schedule is always going to be painful no matter what.
Going shopping with your car having not done it for a while is very definitely no picnic. Managing a child who isn't happy about how long this whole thing takes while you select, pack and eventually unpack your own body weight worth of groceries is not fun. Even if you aren't buying that much, as a lone adult juggling a baby and your groceries and getting all of them into the car while standing in a busy car park is an inherently unfun and often dangerous activity.
Frankly the only non-unpleasant way to do a larger than usual shop alone but with children is to get it home delivered.
And yet somehow, back in the days when family sizes were larger and car ownership rates were lower, people managed.
I think our baselines have shifted: We've become so accustomed to living in places that are designed around the assumption that everyone owns at least one car that it's becoming hard to even imagine things that were just everyday life less than a century ago.
Yep. And the distance they'd have to haul them could be as great as 6 whole blocks, judging by the density of former neighborhood groceries in the historic neighborhood I used to live in.
Conversely, I suspect the density of Snap Fitness locations was much lower. But you have to take the bad with the good.
Incidentally, in my (currently) single-income family I'm expected to pick up groceries on the way home from work. When we were two income, we'd share that responsibility. Historical chore assignments were a product of more than one factor, and I don't think anyone would suggest that all of them were desirable.
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.
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.
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.
If you live reasonably close to a grocery store, you can actually go once per day and don't need to carry that much at any one time. On the plus side the food is more fresh because it didn't have to sit around for a week or two.
Though of course, you can always get a cart or something.
When I lived in Denver many years ago, King Sooper's sent around a flat truck a couple of times a day, picking up grocery carts that had been left on lawns and curbs by pedestrian shoppers. I doubt that something so great could still be happening, but I'd be happy to hear that it is.
Perhaps a stepping stone to a general self-driving car would be a car that could just drive itself back to the store, to have the trunk filled with more bulky purchases.
It's a combination of both. Also consider that traditionally with "vicinity" shops/markets you did your grocery shopping much more often. We are just 3 at home but only do grocery shopping once per week, that would be impossible without a car.
