I could totally be off base here but the more frequently you need to make a trip, the less likely you want to drive to complete it, and therefore pine for somet

I could totally be off base here but the more frequently you need to make a trip, the less likely you want to drive to complete it, and therefore pine for something in close distance, regardless if you have access to an automobile or not. Specifically, in the context of retail, what a retailer stocks (e.g. in a supermarket) or produces (e.g. a sandwich shop) is a function of how much space they have to pay for and how many customers they can get through the door. For example, our expectation of a supermarket is one that carries everything we may possibly want on our grocery list. Whereas our expectation of a regular market, is the limited selection that covers most of what we need. Apologies for the contrived example but the point I’m trying to make is those of us who live in denser areas are used to walking to one of these locations, or making more frequent trips, or both, but it’s not the same feeling for the other. Putting a bike lane next to a supermarket isn’t going to dramatically increase the number of cyclists nor customer foot traffic in relation to what the store already receives. The people coming to a large supermarket are potentially buying a large weight of items across different categories. Even if there was a targeted approach that was marketed towards cyclists (“50% off your entire order if you show up in a helmet and racing attire”, or something extreme of that nature), I don’t think that would move the needle meaningfully because the resulting transactions wouldn’t achieve a hypothetical ideal kg-per-customer ratio (or even a repeat customer multiplier). This would create a situation in which the store has too much product or if you go in the opposite direction of purchasing less product: unappealing empty shelves. So as long as retail density remains low due to limits on how small a landlord is willing to subdivide available space for a tenant, the retailers will continue to engage in business activity that potentially encourages driving via loading up bulk/heavy items, or casting a very large advertising net to attract people outside of walking/biking distance to pack a place. Both of which the end goal is to at least cover their overhead. When you examine dense European cities, I’m not sure you find retail shops that have the same square footage compared to American retail shops. They’re sized (and configured) to cover their overhead by servicing a small amount of customers at a time. If you were to offer an American-sized lease to a European retailer, my guess is they would turn it down unless they were already a very, very popular spot with lines out of the door. In these conversations, I think the general focus should be on what’s occupying the physical destination (and its size) rather than availability/quality of public transit. Since in some places, the transit exists but the impetus to actually use it is minimal.