• The only person whose commute time I know off the top of my head right now commutes by car in 15~20 minutes, so 30~45 minutes is not great.

    People spend far too much of their time working or commuting as it is. The last thing they need is even more commute time.

        • Yeah, but for those trucks you can do with one or two lanes, where you would need 4 lanes otherwise to accomodate the car travel. In my country an average supermarket needs about 2 trucks a day to supply 5000 people. So thats 12 trucks a week or roughly 420 people supplied by a truckload. Assuming people to go to the supermarket once per week, and 2.5 people supplied per car, that is 168 cars for every truck. And a truck doesnt take more space on the road than maybe 4 cars.

          So in our example, with favourable assumptions for cars (e.g. you’d expect grocery shopping a bit more often than once a week, and many household only have one or two people) you need 42 times the road space for the car traffic of the supermarket, compared to the truck traffic.

          I live in an inner city in Europe. I have two supermarkets in 5 minutes walking distance, 4 supermarkets in 10 minutes walking distance, and another 3 just one trainstation away (also about 10 minutes door to door). There is no need for a car and the supermarkets do perfectly fine, with a small road connecting them.