I've actually done this tho

Capitalist government when public transport (a public service) is not making profits

"I don't want to carry bags all that way!"

Here. Take a backpack.

True enough for urban areas.

There's also a lot of more rural areas in Japan where the only thing in walking distance from a house is a bus stop, and it might be a bit of a long walk.

I'm sure there are more remote places, but I haven't been to those places.

Bring back neighborhood grocery stores you can walk to.

This is actually probably more a federal antitrust/competition law thing than a local zoning thing. Otherwise it wouldn't have happened nationwide. I found this article to be pretty persuasive:

Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.

. . .

Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them. It does, however, allow businesses to pass along legitimate savings. If it truly costs less to sell a product by the truckload rather than by the case, for example, then suppliers can adjust their prices accordingly—just so long as every retailer who buys by the truckload gets the same discount.

. . .

During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway.

With discriminatory pricing outlawed, competition shifted onto other, healthier fronts. National chains scrambled to keep up with independents’ innovations, which included the first modern self-service supermarkets, and later, automatic doors, shopping carts, and loyalty programs. Meanwhile, independents worked to match the chains’ efficiency by forming wholesale cooperatives, which allowed them to buy goods in bulk and operate distribution systems on par with those of Kroger and A&P. A 1965 federal study that tracked grocery prices across multiple cities for a year found that large independent grocers were less than 1 percent more expensive than the big chains. The Robinson-Patman Act, in short, appears to have worked as intended throughout the mid-20th century.

Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it.

That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. . . . Kroger, Safeway, and other supermarket chains followed suit. . . . Then, in the 1990s, they embarked on a merger spree. In just two years, Safeway acquired Vons and Dominick’s, while Fred Meyer absorbed Ralphs, Smith’s, and Quality Food Centers, before being swallowed by Kroger. The suspension of the Robinson-Patman Act had created an imperative to scale up.

A massive die-off of independent retailers followed. Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers, creating a “waterbed effect” that amplified the disparity. Price discrimination spread beyond groceries, hobbling bookstores, pharmacies, and many other local businesses. From 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers shrank from 53 percent to 22 percent.

The whole thing is worth reading.

That's literally communism and also the cause of everything wrong with the economy, that's why!

Wdym? In what clown world are trains slow?

I used to take the train to the grocery store. It was called the red line in Chicago

That's just idiotic traffic design. I would tell you a solution but I don't have one. You either make something happen politically or move. Shitty infrastructure is the worst.

My parents, who live in a town, can just walk to buy their groceries instead.

Most of the world is not like Norway and having a car is a necessity not a desire

You likely wouldn't actually want that, as the way it works on star trek at least is to effectively kill you (by recording all your molecules etc then ripping you apart), move your molecules to the new place and then reassemble you.

There's no real way to do 'instant' teleportation like you suggest either as it most likely breaks the laws of physics, things have to move to get places, best you could probably do is very fast teleportation.

That doesn't work if the grocery store is too far to walk or for larger grocery hauls (which often go hand in hand - the further away, the fewer trips you'll want to make). I've been told that some places just genuinely don't have a grocer within 20min walking distance, because some construction planning apparently prefers huge zones of housing without any kind of commercial usage allowed - no baker, no grocer, no hairstylist, no doctor - making it effectively impossible to have any of those amenities in range.

Obviously, that is a planning issue and ought to be fixed. You'll have to contend with NIMBYs, but you'd have to do that with any changes anyway. Alternatively or additionally, you could install a usable network of bus lines and trams (though they shouldn't be run for profit, so it'll be a tough sell too).

There is also the issue of accessibility, but I think that would be trivial to solve as a side effect: If the streets are less crowded with cars, it's easier to offer special accommodation for people with limited mobility or anxiety issues.

This is the most offensive and derogatory form of ableism. I'm reporting this and I'm tagging you as "Person who hates the disabled" and I am not going to spend even a moment thinking about how mass transit or pedestrian pathways might benefit an individual with mobility issues.

Lemme strap my wife and kids to my back while I cycle them all to their destinations then head off to work 50km away in the dead of winter!

Bicycle people have no brain, they think everyone lives in California or some shit

Most Americans leave too far away from any supermarket, even if there were roads that could take you there, either by walking or cycling.

Most Americans lost one or both of their feet to the diabeetus

I live in Houston. We have a grocery store in town that has a big apartment block over the top of it. A friend lives there and he jokes that he's taking the elevator to the grocery store any time I complain about traffic or parking.

Unfortunately, living in a posh apartment that's conveniently placed over a nice grocery store means the price of rent is astronomical. So he needs to work as a highly paid attorney in the oil industry to afford to live in a place where he doesn't need to use a car to get groceries.

Wait until they hear about the Bus. But probably is for the best they don't, their head would explode at the thought

It tends to be much easier in walkable/well designed areas because you have a much higher density of grocery stores.

I have about 8 within a 2-10 minute walk. So I don't really do a big weekly shop, but rather a couple small ones throughout the week.

So yeah, depends hugely on how human-friendly the area is

Just shop daily instead of weekly. A grocery store just opened three blocks from me so I just walk down with a single canvas bag and grab what I need for the next day or two. For the dog, we walk down to the pet store together to grab his food and a treat or toy for him.

Obviously not possible in many suburbs, but when you live in a walkable area it works great.