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> You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike. There's a side effect of car prevalence and land use in the US: everyon

> You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike. There's a side effect of car prevalence and land use in the US: everyone can be "expected" to have a car, so grocery shops tend to locate in places further away with cheaper land, which make it more convenient to make big shops, which require a car... I find that most Americans are not comfortable or even familiar with "I'll pop into the shop to buy milk a block away". Some neighborhoods in cities don't have local grocery shops. So if you're used to that built environment your first thought is "I can't fit a month's worth of food in a cargo bike, let alone ride for 10 miles!?" But if you propose letting a grocery shop in the neighborhood people think "parking, traffic and noise are gonna be terrible!"

Mawr 3y ago
Yeah, I didn't want to get that far into it. For example, today I visited a store, my favourite coffee shop, a pharmacy, and two grocery stores in the span of a little more than an hour. I didn't even cycle, I just walked. The first store was 10 mins away from home. And that's an abnormal trip for me, I usually just pop into a grocery store on my walk home from work. If all I wanted to buy was milk, the overhead would be 5 mins.
bluefirebrand 3y ago
I lived that "grocery store a block away" lifestyle and I still preferred to drive to get groceries. Not because I'm lazy, but because the nearby grocery store often cost more than double for the same items. And it was a grocery store, not a convenience store. Convenience stores were even worse.